This installation, comprising a pavingstone mattress and a digital photograph taken in the darkness because the lens cap was still on, is a double homage to the famous Base of the World (1961) by Piero Manzoni and to Galileo, to whom Manzoni was himself paying tribute. These two elements, one very material, bulky and weighty, and the other one immaterial, impalpable and empty, respectively embodied by opposing materials (stone and digital technology), constitute a poetic universe, a kind of indecipherable dream in which familiar objects take on a little‑known, dissonant, sometimes imprecise appearance. The mattress speaks of rest, sleep, the unconscious, dreams and sensuality. Place of secrets – a refuge from the world – and place of conception, it carries its own contradiction within itself: the man who breathes his last there (when he is lucky enough to die at rest), which is underscored by the stone, a cold, silent and motionless sepulchral element. If these two elements (the atom and the mattress) can generate life, possibility, they also symbolise its absence, going back to dust. (text by Sophie Jaulmes)