Text by Sara Poli
All Images © Marie Hervé and Elsa Martinez
Based between Rome and Marseille, Marie Hervé (Marseille, 1996) and Elsa Martinez (Cahors, 1994) have been working as a duo since 2020. Graduates of the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles, their artistic practice brings together image-making, writing, experimental printing, and scenography. Their installations are shaped by inquiries into the collapse of the Western Empire and operate as forms of speculative archaeology, conceiving of the image and the installation as artifacts.
Human culture returns to the earth, sooner or later. Slowly and inevitably engulfed by that very element it has learned to tame so well, from which it assiduously draws resources and raw materials, whose contemporary names do not seem to originate from pristine soil or vast environmental expanses of fragrant landscapes. Concrete, plastic, aluminum, gasoline, and steel create new structural forms, blanketing our landscape as they merge with a natural environment they know well—all these materials, in some way, originate from an environmental source—but they are materials tamed by humans, whose chemical processes transform them into prototypes almost entirely stripped of the life that once characterized them; the mind is drawn to the glorious pagan temples in porphyry, travertine, or marble; the Cosmatesque or mosaic floors, featuring dancing satyrs or fertility gods. This naturally leads to a question: what name will be given, millennia from now, to this culture of the third millennium A.D., when its infrastructure—hypothetically unearthed in two or five thousand years—is rediscovered, and will it still manage to uphold the Western myth of the old world?
Marie Hervé and Elsa Martinez seek to answer this unique question by employing the same method used by the director of an archaeological or mining site: extraction. Their extractive practice is centered on a preferred medium: photography and its infinite avenues of exploration. The initial phase of Marie and Elsa’s projects is typically analog photography to document territories; subsequently, the two artists employ various printing media to produce the images: screen printing, risograph, and even printing on concrete, as in the series Concrete Artefact, 2025. At times, these images are further altered through digital interventions in post-production, seeking to emulate artifacts—now rendered contemporary—and formulating a sort of fragmentary glossary of our time. These printing techniques, in addition to being extremely delicate, aim in some way to counter the perfect visibility and comprehensibility of the images’ content: an attempt to bring light back to the material aspect, shifting the focus to the analog and chemical medium of historical photography, of its origins. From Sicily, Puglia, or Palestine, but also in other parts of Europe, the artists have set out to document not only our antiquity but also our redundant present. If we look at the photographs, in fact, this dual nature is made evident through the printing media and the subjects—which give the photographs an old-fashioned feel—yet there are elements that refer to our contemporary world, reinforcing the ambiguity of the images, which consequently transport us to rarefied times and spaces, difficult to pinpoint, and which intelligently reproduce a contemporary landscape grammar capable of giving voice to what today often appears stripped of meaning, bare.
This suspension of space and time, however, is not intended as a fetishization of bygone eras, but rather as a series of open-ended hypotheses about new futuristic geographies and a possible coexistence between two eras that are so distant from one another yet inevitably inseparable: the past and the future. The language and imaginative approach of Hervé and Martinez evoke the cult of the ancient Roman goddess Carmenta, associated with pregnancy and childbirth and inextricably—since she protected the unborn child until the moment of its birth —linked to a before and an after, becoming in the plural Carmentes antevorta and postvorta, or “she who knows the past and she who knows the future”—an oracle of a goddess linked to both the past and the future, as if they were inevitably two connected and inseparable times, children of the same era. This dual-temporal aspect refers to the very nature of photography: every shot is an act that belongs simultaneously to two times, crystallizing a moment already past at the very instant the light is captured, consigning it to a future still unknown. The before and the after are not separate, but coexist within the image, much like the two aspects of the Roman goddess. The same logic applies to archaeology: what is buried enters a different time—suspended and silent—radically different from the time of the surface. The moment of discovery is not simply a return, but a collision between two temporalities that have existed separately, long unaware of one another, and which suddenly find themselves coexisting in the same light. The photographic practice thus becomes the unearthed oracle of this project: the multi-material medium and the presences imprinted upon it whisper, amid the interstices of time, delicate hypotheses of memory and transformation.
