JULIEN BONET - Digger

Technique: Promptography on Hahnemühle Fine Art paper
Size: 50 x 40 cm
Edition: 3 + 1 AP
Year: 2024-25

Signed, dated and edition numbered by the artist on a separate label.

Digger

A body fused with stone. The surface appears to have grown out of geological ages—veins of green, brown, and blue crisscross the cloak, which is both camouflage and revelation. Only the bare feet betray the humanity beneath the monument. Digger is neither human nor rock, but a transitional being: a fragment of memory from a time when nature and humanity were still inextricably linked.

This figure digs not with tools, but with its very existence. It represents the labor that disappears and the resources that are being extracted from the earth—mineral, metal, energy. The body as raw material, the landscape as a mirror of exploitation. At the same time, however, the figure harbors a spiritual dimension: In its static state, it appears like a pillar, an altar, a guardian of the invisible.

Bonet's Masquerades series transforms an ancient motif: the mythical "earth man," who mediates between worlds—between subterranean and surface, death and renewal. In a present marked by environmental crises and struggles over raw materials, Digger becomes an image of our dependence: We dig to live, yet simultaneously erode our own foundations beneath us.

Part of the ongoing series Masquerades – contemporary myths between fear, ritual and collective memory.