Mummy Mummies.

Mutel, Didier; Alain Fleischer. Mummy Mummies.

[Rome]: Didier Mutel, 1999. First Edition.

(32 x 25 cm). 48 pp. and six photographs (17 x 12 cm). This is copy no. 25.

Printed by Didier Mutel on the press of the Villa Médicis in Rome on Velin d’Arches, 160 grams, in a limited edition of 44 copies, 20 of which are numbered 1-20 for Alain Fleischer, 20 copies numbered 21-40 for Didier Mutel, and 4 copies numbered 41-44 reserved for friends of the collaborators, all copies signed by Fleischer and Mutel. Text and original photographs by Alain Fleischer published at the l’Académie de France, Villa Médicis in Rome. The text was photoengraved and etched with acid on copper plates. Six original chemically unfixed silver gelatin photographs, protected by red safelight polyester barrier sheets, and housed in a lead slipcase.

Mummy, Mummies is the second work by Didier Mutel published in Rome, during a fellowship at the Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome. This work was conceived in collaboration with Alain Fleischer, an artist and director of the Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains. Fleischer, who later published on the topic as well, provided Mutel with a set of six original photographs of mummies from the Crypt of Ferentillo in the Umbria region of Italy, and an essay accompanying the images.

The essay addresses the ironic tension Fleischer sees between the preservation of human remains in mummified form and preservation by photographic means, evaluating the imprint (“empreinte”) that each process leaves to posterity. Mounted in blind impressions facing the text, the photographs were prepared unfixed, but protected from light damage by red safelight barrier sheets which conserve the images just as the mummies of Ferentillo are conserved in their crypt—each exposition of the images to the bare light of day will, over time, bring out in each of them the darkness into which they will disappear.

Born in Paris in 1944, Alain Fleischer is a writer, film-maker, artist and photographer. He is founder and director of the National Fresnoy-Studio for Contemporary Arts, and also the author of some fifty literary works (novels, short stories and essays) and has directed 350 films (feature films, experimental films and art documentaries).