Marking the death last month of American sculptor Richard Serra, this month’s Cover Story looks back to the Latitudes-curated exhibition “4.543 billion. The matter of matter” at CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux. Serra’s name did not appear on the list of artists. Yet the raw geophysicality of the processes involved in producing and installing his work “Threats of Hell” (1990) in the cavernous CAPC nave was the protagonist of an extraordinary suite of documentary images by Anne Garde. Seen here during the exhibition setup, the selection of Garde’s works—previously categorised as press photos—showed neither Serra nor his finished sculpture, which comprised three steel slabs, each weighing 43 tonnes. Instead, the focus lay on the material transformations demanded by the fabrication of the metal pieces and the quasi-archaeological proceedings involved in siting them.

Garde journeyed to Dillingen, Germany, to see massive molten lumps of metal being formed into the three huge slabs of weatherproof steel at Dillinger Hütte, a steelworks with unusually large heavy-plate rolling mills. In Bordeaux, her lens captured the excavation of the museum floor to establish foundations for “Threats of Hell”, revealing the water table of the underlying subsoil. The concept behind the “4.543 billion” exhibition stemmed from the CAPC building’s former life as a warehouse for colonial commodities, its limestone walls once buried deep in the ground, its wooden beams once part of a forest. And Garde’s camera-eye, whether witnessing the pouring of concrete or the assembly of hoists, imagined primeval scenes of ecological upheaval in the museum that evoked a geological, rather than art-historical, understanding of time. Curiously enough, the slabs were later reconfigured for a private collection. The title was deemed too ominous. Now presently installed in a garden on the banks of the Garonne river, the work was rechristened “Hopes of Paradise”.