Writing a history of manhunts is writing a fragment of a long history of violence perpetrated by the powerful. It is also writing the history of the technologies of predation indispensable for the establishment and reproduction of relations of domination.
In Manhunts, Grégoire Chamayou argues that the human hunt should not be understood as a metaphor. It refers to concrete historical phenomena in which human beings were tracked, captured, or killed according to the methods of the hunt; these were regular practices, sometimes on a large scale, whose forms were first theorized in ancient Greece, long before their massive expansion in the modern era, alongside the development of transatlantic capitalism.
This work inspired Pol Taburet to think of humanity through the prism of the hunt. By negating the concept, Pol enters another submerged medium that runs through our history.
Pol’s work is disconcerting. A uniform light bathes the space, like in a liminal zone—a place you cannot quite locate, carrying a strange sense of desolation and solitude. These spaces have become very well-known in internet circles in recent years.
In Someone’s Child (2025), Pol Taburet presents an installation composed of bronze sculptures with trumpets attached to the mouth, called Lungs; a bronze sculpture in the shape of a face, called Guts; and a central piece in earth and polystyrene, called Belly. Brought together in a room conceived as a swamp—with an earthen floor and an immersive atmosphere—these works form a scene suggesting a natural landscape, dense and in constant transformation.
The earth-and-polystyrene sculpture, placed as the central element, establishes a direct dialogue with this shifting environment, echoing the organic and irregular aspect of the surrounding terrain. Meanwhile, the bronze sculptures, scattered across the floor and also affixed to the walls, reinforce the idea of a heterogeneous ensemble in which different forms of existence coexist and share the same environment. The figures appear as hybrids in mutation—somewhere between human, animal, and spirit. The dark volumes, some gleaming, others opaque, evoke presences oscillating between a ghostly dimension and the materiality of the body.
At the center, two figures that seem to be wearing hats whisper a secret to each other. They appear to be watched by the other sculptures.
More than representing specific mythologies or narratives, Taburet constructs a suspended scene in which matter and symbol intertwine. The visitor is invited to cross this unstable, dreamlike, and indeterminate space, navigating between sensations of familiarity and estrangement.