This first book by Valentin Fleuret presents his 2025's iconographic research among books destined for pulping at the Rennes 2 University Library. Comprising 30 iconographic plates containing more than 200 images, this book follows in the tradition of appropriation while renewing it through the subject it addresses.
The entire project revolves around the term "weeding," borrowed from gardening jargon by libraries to describe the process of removing and then permanently disposing of certain documents from a collection. Valentin Fleuret takes advantage of this lexical connection to weave a deeper link between the garden, from which weeds and wilted plants are removed, and the library, from which works considered useless are withdrawn. From the artist's perspective, weeded books are to libraries what fallow land is to gardens. This book therefore functions like a herbarium: each page has been extracted from one of these weeded books—like a leaf, petal, or stem taken from a plant—to be preserved.
Valentin Fleuret is a visual artist who lives and works in Rennes.
Working in the field of publishing and printed matters, Valentin Fleuret
has collaborated with several specialized organizations in Rennes, such
as the Cabinet du Livre d'Artiste (CLA) and Lendroit éditions. In the
tradition of artist-iconographers, he constructs narratives through the
manipulation and deployment of archival resources and documents with a
special interest in books.
