In 2025, the horizon feels closer—heat, smoke, and water rewriting the map.We learn the rhythm of alerts, the vocabulary of “after,” the taste of suspended time. Everything points forward, yet the present keeps fraying at the edges. The end is no longer a scene to imagine, but a process already at work.
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Odds and Ends takes “the end” as an active process at work in what surrounds us, and sketches a portrait of a smoking Earth left to itself. Marie Quéau chose to move through territories and sites that could carry her anxiety about what comes next. She often approaches the work as a kind of obituary for our planet, evoking its accidents and its slow collapse.
The investigation proceeds by rebounds—one place calling up another. Over five years, wind, earth, and fire guided the construction of this fatal fable, a long sequence of images that brings together the destructive potential of natural elements with the anxiety of a future without life, a future that no longer feels so unreal. Time is deliberately suspended, as if to muffle life. For the artist, it is a poem without humans.
Jean-Christophe Bailly writes that the narrative rests on the way leftovers—what we reject or abandon—become blocks of meaning, a kind of ruins of the future. They carry not only mystery but also unease: it is tomorrow, the after, the post-accidental that is being questioned. The link to science fiction is clear and claimed, not through the fantastic, but through the fictional proliferation of the objects themselves.
The book is structured along two axes. A first, fictional and imagined section in which each image communicates with another through a detail, a tone, a shape, and it is through the accumulation of photographs that the scenario takes form. In this spirit, Marie Quéau invited Amélie Lucas-Gary to write a chant to accompany this vast visual story; her text offers a reading that is both personal and open-ended, retracing the path and emotion of Lucie, a character who substitutes for the artist’s gaze. A second section returns to the real, with an author’s note and a precise index describing the places traveled and documented between 2013 and 2017.
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