Douglas Mandry: A Distant Smell of Dust

A Distant Smell of Dust by Douglas Mandry centers on a selection of deteriorated autochromes from Les Archives de la Planète, a pioneering early 20th-century photographic archive commissioned by Albert Kahn to visually document global diversity. Mandry’s reinterpretation of these historical images is inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ fable On Rigor in Science, which describes an empire where cartography becomes so exact that only a map on the same scale as the empire itself will suffice. Later generations come to disregard the map, however, and as it decays, so does the land and society beneath it.

Through layered techniques using watercolor and lithographic ink on silk, Mandry explores the tension between visual clarity and abstraction. The work challenges the Western, naturalistic tropes embedded in the original archive, transforming them into fluid, ambiguous representations akin to heat maps or aerial views. By merging archival decay with painterly intervention, the project questions the validity of past visual paradigms and invites reflection on how nature is perceived in the age of digital acceleration. Printed on large 70 × 100 cm sheets, folded twice and bound, the book includes a bilingual (French/English) text insert featuring the essay From Archive to Matter by art historian and curator Bernard Vienat.

Published with the kind support of Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council.