An article by Jeffrey Kastner in Cabinet magazine features an “unusual artistic collaboration between the French artist Hubert Duprat and a group of caddis fly larvae”:
A small winged insect belonging to the order Trichoptera and closely related to the butterfly, caddis flies live near streams and ponds and produce aquatic larvae that protect their developing bodies by manufacturing sheaths, or cases, spun from silk and incorporating substances—grains of sand, particles of mineral or plant material, bits of fish bone or crustacean shell—readily available in their benthic ecosystem. The larvae are remarkably adaptable: if other suitable materials are introduced into their environment, they will often incorporate those as well. . . .
After collecting the [caddis fly] larvae from their normal environments, [Duprat] relocates them to his studio where he gently removes their own natural cases and then places them in aquaria that he fills with alternative materials from which they can begin to recreate their protective sheaths. He began with only gold spangles but has since also added the kinds of semi-precious and precious stones (including turquoise, opals, lapis lazuli and coral, as well as pearls, rubies, sapphires, and diamonds) seen here. The insects do not always incorporate all the available materials into their case designs, and certain larvae, Duprat notes, seem to have better facility with some materials than with others. Additionally, cases built by one insect and then discarded when it evolves into its fly state are sometimes recovered by other larvae, who may repurpose it by adding to or altering its size and form.
The interpreter who accompanied me to the garden is over six foot tall, he could see above the wall, so I thin that the dimensions are roughly Vitruvian, fitting the proportions of Litnianski’s body.
Like the windows of the Edwardian school where I live, designed to be above the child’s height, so that students would not be distracted by the view outside. The main dioramas of small objects are at eye level. In the Poetics of Space, Bachelard describes the interior as an intimate space and the outside a void. Litnianski’s garden in this sense is an interior space and looking at it even when he was alive gave me, at least, the impression of entering something private and forbidden. Litninianski (or in my case his son) used to invite the visitor to follow him into the space, where you would remain enclosed until he let you out.
On first sight of the house, it has the appearance of a modern hermitage. The hermitage was designed to look as though built by the hermit himself, with his surrounding objects. Looking more carefully, one can see the house is tiny and hidden within these rocky columns. It is more lie Saint-Pol Roux’s home, a fisherman’s cottage encased in a manor house. Litnianski began collecting things that had become useless, dirty, broken, empty, unfashionable or perhaps embarrassing.
Bodhan Litnisansi came from Russia to France as a teenager in the 1930s. He fought in the Second World War, was captured and spent five years in a prison camp. After the war he was repatriated to Viry-Noureuil, where he bought a house that was cheap and dilapidated. Reconstructing his house, he started to collect shells from the local restuarants wich he used to decorate the walls. Litnianski also started his daily visit to the local tip, hoarding his finds in a slag heap at the back of his house. Out of this encyclopedic collection of Viry-Noureuil’s stuff, grew a garden of jumbled chronological stratas; a mythical map of the village.
This wall is the side of Litniansi’s house and is not just rendered with these objects but made out of them. These, he told the local newspaper, were among his favourite objects, because of the stories they told.
