Dead But Alive
Our relationship with the environment in which we live is comparable, say, to the relationship between a container and its contents, each of which has developed independently of the other. Such a relationship may or may not imply a reciprocal correspondence. Ours is always a relationship of correspondence—which does not rule out the possibility that such a relationship (as often happens) can turn out to be substantially negative for us and our environment. And yet there is no doubt that here the container and the contents, the human condition and the human environment, are the result of one and the same dialectical process, one and the same process of mutual conditioning and formation.
In 2023, wildfires ravaged an unprecedented stretch of Canadian territory. Robert Bibeau conceived Dead But Alive in memory of those decimated forests. The mourning sits in the material itself.
A charred branch rises, blackened down to the wood, stripped of every leaf. Beside it, a figure carved from pale wood stands on a sculpted pedestal. The body is skeletal, ribs and spine exposed, the head held upright, the gaze level. Both verticals climb from a single slab of bark, broad and warped at the edges. And there, on that burned ground, moss has grown back. A quiet, stubborn green, clustered in tight tufts at the figure's feet.
The title holds both ends at once. The tree is dead, the body too, and still the moss lives. The dead wood used to carve the figure becomes, through the gesture, a vessel of presence. The burned forest does not close the account. Something persists beneath the ash, and it is that remainder Robert Bibeau set out to make visible.
The work belongs to the memento mori, that old genre where art recalls death the better to make life felt. Robert Bibeau shifts it toward the ecological: what is at stake is no longer a human vanity but the fate of a forest, and with it of an entire territory. The skeletal figure could be a tree turned man, or a man reduced to the tree; the work does not decide, and that is what keeps it open. A question remains, one the moss poses in silence: does regrowth truly console for what has burned, or does it merely cover it over.