This column-relic is built from concrete breeze blocks onto which images collected from heterogeneous sources have been transferred: colonial ethnographic photographs, botanical illustrations, family archives, popular representations. These layers of images overlap, contaminate and efface one another. The material is eroded by the cristallisation of salt, which eats into the concrete and distorts the images.

It is an act of material desarchivage: these images — notably ethnographic photographs drawn from colonial collections — are extracted from their institutional frame and reactivated within a sculptural device that does not fix them but allows them to deform and superimpose. The archive is no longer a site of preservation but a living organism subject to time and matter.

The vertical stele performs a gesture of re-visibilisation: rendering visible images that have until now remained hidden in institutional reserves. Yet in eroding them with salt, the work also reminds us that every archive is already an act of alteration — and that the gesture of desarchiving does not restore an original; it produces something new from the fragments.