A speculation about still-secret letters from British prime ministers to Royal Navy nuclear submarine commanders, regarding the measures to be taken in the event of an atomic attack. A meditation on these inaccessible letters – which may or may not actually exist – gives rise to an atypical monument: a “reverse” memorial which challenges the very concept of history by revealing the tangled relationships between a non-verified past, a conditional present and a possible future. Creator of a disembodied monument, the artist also questions himself about the resources and formal shaping of his experiment: instead of marble or bronze we have an exchange of correspondence; instead of a historical event, something that has never (or not yet) taken place. Speaking to us about what might have been, Ante-Memorial brings the conditional, the past and the future tense together in a speculative protocol open to a host of contingencies • Guillaume Désanges, curator


Ante-memorial 2011–Present
Correspondence
Various sizes