Amélie Bouvier is featured in OKV – Amélie Bouvier: De fictie van astronomische beeldvorming (August - September 2025 issue), an interview conducted by Yasmin Van 'Tveld.
"Bouvier questions astronomical heritage through archives and explores what these illustrations and representations reveal about our (in)ability to preserve and transmit history and memories, and how images transform a story. Her research resulted in drawings, textile works, and a sound installation, which she brings together in her solo exhibition Stars, don’t fail me now! at Harlan Levey Projects in Brussels.
At the heart of the exhibition is her new series Photodessinographie: meticulous graphite and ink drawings based on damaged glass plates from a Paris observatory, featuring photographic negative images of the sun.
Much of your work is inspired by astronomy and images of the cosmos. Why that choice?
Amélie Bouvier:
In 2018, I came across the book L’astronomie au féminin by Yaël Nazé, in which she focuses on stories of women in astronomy. One of those stories is about the Harvard College Observatory at the end of the 19th century, when a new director, Edward Charles Pickering (1846–1919), was appointed. He wasn’t satisfied with the staff and appointed his cleaning lady, Williamina Fleming (1857–1911). She did her work so well that he then almost exclusively hired women. All the scientific documentation—sketches of planets, mapping of galaxies, processing of glass plates—was openly carried out by this female team, without their contributions being hidden, as was usually the case at the time. These archival materials have been very important for my work.
I’m actually more interested in the stories, history, and anecdotes surrounding astronomy than in the science itself. In search of interesting material, I visit various archives, such as the Harvard Plate Stacks and those of the Observatoire de Paris in Meudon, and I also engage in conversations with scientists and historians in the field.
Are there other stories that particularly resonate with you?
For the upcoming exhibition, I’m using material from, among others, Percival Lowell (1855–1916), an astronomer who primarily observed Mars and speculated about canals that he believed must have been dug by living organisms. His theories later gave rise to the idea of ‘little green Martians.’ Not directly, of course; science fiction writer H.G. Wells based his novel The War of the Worlds (1898) on this, which in turn sparked other ideas.
Another fascinating figure is Camille Flammarion (1842–1925, French astronomer, ed.), who wrote L’Astronomie populaire (1879). His images still influence how we envision space today, and they also reflect what people longed for back then—a very romanticized version of worlds beyond our own. He also wrote books about the end of the world, filled with apocalyptic theories related to astrology, such as comet Halley.
In turn, I want to question how our ideas and visual perceptions are influenced by the ways in which others before us have represented the universe throughout history. For instance, before photography was introduced into astronomy, drawings were sometimes made by someone looking through a telescope and describing what they saw to an artist who did their best to draw it blindly. You can imagine how much interpretation ended up in those illustrations..."
Please find the original article in its entirety (in Flemish) here.