Shells are a constitutive element of the Lutetian limestone that makes up the earth’s crust in the Paris Basin, and have been quarried for building stone since Antiquity at least. Beneath the capital, formerly known as Lutetia, there is still an extensive network of quarries. Their ceilings sometimes show a constellation of cerites, small shells deposited and fossilised millions of years ago. An identical geological layer was
formed at the same time in the Cairo basin, hence the pyramids of Giza are built of Lutetian type limestone.
Under the Roman Empire, Lutetia gradually took on the name of Paris. In the 17th century, the name was thought to refer to the Egyptian goddess Isis, on the grounds that «per/par» in ancient Egyptian meant
«dwelling, house». The city would thus be a « house of Isis », and Notre Dame was even said to have been built on the remains of a temple to Isis, a theory that was widely recycled in the 19th century, the heyday of Egyptomania in France.
According to the myth, Osiris, king of the world and husband of Isis, was murdered, cut into pieces and scattered all over the world. Isis reassembles them and creates the first mummy by reconstituting the body. Osiris then becomes king of the afterlife and is at the centre of mortuary practices in ancient Egypt.
Scattered body parts are precisely what you’ll find in the old Paris quarries, which had to be closed down towards the end of the 18th century for safety reasons: this underground maze was causing repeated collapses on the surface, and was used by smugglers to evade the tax on goods entering the city. At the same time, the cemeteries of Paris were spewing their surplus of corpses all over the place, causing a real public health problem, and it was decided to transfer as many human remains as possible to the now unused quarries.
Areas where there are no ossuaries have sometimes been filled in with soil from outside the quarry, and when this fill is stirred up, it yields traces of past lives: belt buckles, coins, various fragments and, often, oyster shells.
Gaëlle Leenhardt has collected hundreds of oyster shells, which she uses like small rubble stones to clad the sculptures in this indefinite installation in the quarries of Paris. All at once sculptor, fitter and mason, she binds them together with natural lime, following the model of the ancient opus incertum, which entangles irregularly shaped stones as much as possible.
Variations in the size, shape and colour of the oysters make up a rough mosaic that covers basins hung on the wall or built on the ground, which could be sepulchre canopic vases or primitive stoups.
With time and passage, the lime and shells will gradually blend into the soil to form a new, ultra-localised layer of shelly limestone, which may one day fill a future archaeologist with perplexity.