Pascaline Ambard
Preparing the exhibition of her work at FRAC Corsica, Pascaline Amblard discovered, the Corsican nuthatch - the island’s last endemic bird species. Her residency at Providenza offers an opportunity to deepen her field research through patient observation and long periods of watching from hides. As a visual and installation artist, Pascaline's practice engages assemblage and collecting, creating installations that inhabit and transform the spaces in which they are presented. Observing the Corsican nuthatch becomes an invitation to immersive work on the ways of inhabiting an ecosystem.
The Corsican Nuthatch is dependent on the Corsican Pine.
Dependent is the adjective I find in field guides to describe the relationship between these two species.
A double definition,
a double entry,
a double usage.
1. Placed under the dependence of.
2. ECOLOGY: Able to live only at the expense of a particular species or habitat.
I wonder whether the use of this adjective has truly shed what it carries within it: submission, subjection.
The Corsican Nuthatch remains defined by the authority of its territory, by the necessity of another presence.
A double authority: that of the conifer itself, and that of the island.
A relationship between habitat and living being.
Which is also a relationship between one living being and another.
Because
the pine is both habitat and companion.
A relationship that might instead be described as:
Placed under the tender attachment of.
A bond explained by its beak.
A beak searching for reserves of possibility, for seeds.
The Corsican Nuthatch feeds almost exclusively on the seeds of the Corsican Pine. Unlike those of the Maritime Pine, their shells are soft enough for the nuthatches to crack open and eat.
Commensal (noun / adjective)
1. A person who eats at the same table as another.
2. BIOLOGY: An organism that lives in association with another species, benefiting from the remains of its food without harming or parasitising it.
To be bound by what is ingested,
by what is hidden, swallowed,
by our tongues, our bodies.
I went to observe this nuthatch in the Asco Valley. I found only pines, their cavities, and empty seeds.
Starting from the assumption of its presence, I tried to trace the outlines of this relationship: their exchanges, their agreements, their forms of care.
I questioned my own relationships, the ties that sustain them, my shared intimacies.
In that attentive state, my gaze shifted, my senses blurred, the pine needles lost their physicality.
Back at Providenza, I wrote from these shifts in perception that transformed the way I encountered the landscape, its scents, its heights.
To write within this territory, this inhabited environment, crossed by signs, rhythms and thresholds.
To echo this experience of observation.
To understand the link between the song of the European Nightjar - which my ears had searched for so long - and the colours of dusk.
The landscapes of this place, so powerful, and its living beings, so present, inevitably found their way into this text. The calls of the two Eurasian Scops Owls became the punctuation of my sentences, of my gestures. Likewise, the drumming of Great Spotted Woodpeckers in the oak overlooking my cabin displaced certain syllables.
Every morning, on the path to the Fabrica, I watched the chicory flowers unfold. By the time I finished my coffee, they were already folding back in on themselves. A daily dance that washed the field in its peculiar violet before yielding to the straw-yellow the wind so loves to sweep across. Through all the encounters it made possible, this residency allowed me to rethink the temporalities that shape my days, arranging them according to the wind, according to a birdsong, according to other passages.
·
The pine needles have lost their physicality.
They are no longer tangible.
They no longer prick, nor snap, nor crumble, nor dry out, nor smell, nor fall, nor catch fire, nor are they gathered, nor piled.
They are no longer true beneath my hands.
They exist only in written form:
a line
a dot
a line
·
Pointed eyes,
two protruding eyeballs.
Two small mountains covered with irises.
With every blink, each summit tears through the eyelid.
After some time, the protective film split open.
The divided skin revealed a new vertical slit.
When the eyes close,
a new track guides the gaze.
The wind seeps in constantly, blowing across and eroding these two small peaks.
The snow melts, spilling down as liquid humour.
the tear runs
the sea overflows the mountain
a point
an iris
a point
·
This stump is crying.
It weeps tears of honey: thick, viscous, sweet.
So thick, so viscous, so sweet that they trickle at the speed of rust.
The hollows of the mountain are filled with copper nails.
a tear
a dot
a groove
·
These ones must not be picked up.
Ruiniform stones will always seek to return to their original formation, to re-enact its shape. To find their place again beside those with whom they have sometimes spent decades.
·
An assembly of two sloping sides: the adret and the ubac joined by a river.
·
I let my gaze wander.
My eyes move at the end of a leash made of optic nerve.
Each piece of information irrigates my nervous system before reaching my empty eyelids.
A delay between sound and image.
A lack of synchrony; the price to pay for seeing beyond my own body.
The first time I heard the sound without the image, my body tried to fill the gap.
Then image appeared.
image slips in to make up for delays, for details gone missing.
Before the shades of red: image.
Before the lake within a landscape: image.
Before the St John's wort: image.
Sometimes I let my gaze lose itself,
so that image remains long enough to be contemplated.
a leash
a gaze
an image
image
·
I eat tongue.
I press a cooked, soft tongue against my living tongue.
I turn it seven times in my mouth.
the first to apprehend
the second to tear the flesh
the third to slice the taste buds
the fourth to break the muscles
the fifth to summon saliva
the sixth to grasp the words it contains
the seventh to absorb.
·
With every click of the teeth, names change.
Learning a language becomes nest-building.
Mouth-nests inside parched throats,
from which a few words sometimes hatch.
a tongue
a word
a tongue
·
a bond
a knot
a bond
Credits
Portrait : Doriane
