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This 1992 work, Memoire du Futur by Anne and Patirck Poirier features a single stainless steel column in the classical greek style. The column is represented as shifted and misaligned, as though shaken by an earthquake. The work aims to have audiences reflect on the lessons of the past and how it can prepare us for the future. Despite the changes that the future holds, this work aims to ground audiences with a reminder of their past as they forge ahead to in their future. The imagery of the column evokes a reminder of the precariousness of civilization.

Anne Poirier and Patrick Poirier are a French art duo. From 1963 to 1966 they studied at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. After winning the Prix de Rome, they lived from 1969 to 1971 in the Villa Medici in Rome as fellows of the Académie de France à Rome. They currently split their time between Paris and Trevi. Though they have worked in a variety of media, including photography, drawing, installation and monumental public sculpture, their oeuvre has always dealt with themes surrounding memory, archeology, ruins, memento mori, disintegration, loss and remembering. As they articulate it, “we believe that ignorance or the destruction of cultural memory brings in its wake every sort of oblivion, falsehood and excess and that we must, with all the modest means at our disposal, oppose this generalized amnesia and destruction.”