Silent portraits along Route D47 - drawings by 1011

What happens when the worlds of humans and animals literally collide? Along our roads, a silent tragedy unfolds every day, with the slowest and most vulnerable paying the highest price. Each year, more than 220 million animals are killed by traffic in Europe.

This forms the starting point of the work of French visual artist 1011. Her drawings originate in her childhood, when she would collect dead birds along the busy Route D47. What was then a painful discovery is now recognized as an early encounter with the Anthropocene.

In 2024, 1011 returned to this road and collected small animals killed there: songbirds, butterflies, salamanders, weasels, and hedgehogs. She carefully redraws each animal on a large scale, creating individual portraits. Inspired by 18th-century natural history illustrations, her colored-pencil drawings reveal a confronting reality: the irreversible disappearance of plants and animals.

1011 is a French visual artist, born in 1970 in Brittany. She studied Fine Arts at the University of Rennes. Her work, deeply philosophical in nature, explores how humanity is increasingly dominated by technology and the consequences of this process, past and present. This series raises pressing questions about the loss of everyday biodiversity and our role in it.

‘Silent Portraits along Route D47 – drawings by 1011’ is on view from 6 June to 20 September 2026.
See this website of 1011 for more information about her work.