Cartographie Éphémère

On 7 January 2019, Mendia Echeverria entered the Bois de Vincennes in Paris for the first time, accompanied by a map, a camera and a plan. Her goal, to unravel the mysteries surrounding Le Grand Rocher, a 65-metre high hollow artificial rock built in 1934 in the middle of the park. Four months later, Mendia came out with this collection of images, a cartography of that time and place.

This book is the result of a theoretical and visual reflection on the photographic construction of memory; an artistic investigation that allows us to obtain a trace, both past and present, of the place photographed. The author introduces us to a world where the natural and the artificial coexist in a paradoxical way, proposing a journey through space and time, and generating a physical map in which the real - the forest - and the simulacrum - the rock - form an inseparable whole, a reflection of the contemporary world.