Dungeness by Gaspard Le Guen

Dungeness 

Gaspard Le Guen

The Dungeness headland, in the southeast of England, is the only desert in Great Britain. Covered by one of the largest expanses of gravel in Europe, Dungeness is among the world’s most densely populated sites of nautical mythology. It was there that Joseph Conrad (1857, Berdichev—now Ukraine, then Poland – 1924, Bishopsbourne, England) made his home when he left his life at sea to devote himself to writing.

Over several months, immersed in the work and figure of the writer, Gaspard Le Guen (Le Havre, France, 1992), in dialogue with Gabriel Hörner (León, Mexico, 1963), created a body of work that gradually took the form of a funeral elegy, revealing itself as a continuation of his previous project Servicio Nocturno—an evocation of the possible lives inhabiting the decaying warehouse of a funeral business in Querétaro. In this new development, the artist becomes a castaway arranging the remnants of the shipwreck so that they may sing the elegy of the man who perhaps glimpsed—“just as a glimmer makes a fog visible”—the human condition better than anyone else. Yet Le Guen distrusts objects: the remains of this shipwreck will only find meaning at dusk on November 25th, during the celebration of the funeral rites for the one who once wrote:

“The ethical conception of the universe finally plunges us into so many cruel and absurd contradictions—in which the last vestiges of faith, hope, charity, and even reason, seem on the verge of vanishing—that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot possibly be ethical. I vehemently believe its purpose is mere spectacle: a spectacle for awe, love, adoration, or hatred, if you will—but never for despair! Those visions, delightful or pathetic, are a moral end in themselves… And perhaps the task assigned to us in this world is to pay perpetual and disinterested attention to every phase of the living universe as it is reflected in our consciousness, endowed with a voice to bear faithful witness to the visible wonder… to the sublime spectacle.”

-Gabriel Hörner