Focus: Fallen

Fallen is a sculpture made by Marilène Oliver in 2010. At the time the sculpture was originally made, Oliver was thinking of the challenges of motherhood and impossibility of being able to protect the next generation from the many potential harms in the world.

In Messis, the Fallen sculpture plays the role of the deity Touch, to whom the characters offer a prayer to enable them to leave their physical bodies and find each other in the metaverse.

Fallen is based on an anonymized full body scan dataset called Melanix from the OsiriX database. Marilène Oliver customized the dataset, like one would a gaming avatar, to give it eight arms. In the sculpture however, the female figure is falling, unable to use her arms to protect her children who are now out of reach.

The sculpture was made laboriously of hand cut coroplast. This material was chosen as it gives a pixelated surface from the front and back, but becomes transparent almost transparent when viewed from the side, suggesting an emptiness in the digitized body.

A previously unknown detail about this work is that when it was glued together, thousands of small black insects were attracted to the glue and flew into it. Marilène Oliver had to later pick out each tiny insect individually but some went so deep inside the figure it was impossible to remove them.