calendario eventi  :: 

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14/5/2013

Sciences&Fictions

De Roussan gallery, Paris

Curated by Manuela de Barros

Group show: Sandra Aubry et Sébastien Bourg, Tom Bénard, David Guez, Ludovic Duchateau, Lily Hibberd, Marion Laval-Jantet et Jean-Sébastien Guiliani, Baden Pailthorpe, Gwenola Wagon et Stéphane Degoutin.

The exhibition Sciences&Fictions is a reflection on the sharing of knowledge between two supposedly opposite worlds: modern science and narrative fictions. These two fields inspire each other through the construction of an imaginary that flows freely between them.

Eleven artists have been chosen to interpret this theme through eight artworks, adopting very diverse media: installation, video, sculptures, drawings and books. Together, these works can be seen as futurologistic explorations of our present, literary perspectives of the changes in our societies and in our aspirations, explorations of the tools which constitute our technological environment of literary dystopias, or indeed, the human journey in a world rendered neutral, ready to be reinvested in by our desires.

In the video Cyborgs dans la brume (Cyborgs in the Mist), at once a documentary and constructed narrative, Gwenola Wagon and Stéphane Degoutin discover a geographical and societal, scientific and technological, real and imaginary territory which extrapolates the fictions which become our reality. This scalpel-like cartography of a street in Seine Saint-Denis reveals the industries hidden in disembodied and anonymous buildings, the heterogeneous tapestry of the populations living there, and mysterious transhumanist researchers who implement an anthropological jump operated by technology. The machine, this eminent symbol of modern sciences, is everywhere. The city itself becomes a giant machinery in which some human beings search frantically for transcendence.

Tom Bénard’s sculpture similarly references Transhumanism. Yet by displacing the machinic dominance of a human-machine hybrid in Cyborgs dans la brume, the organic here gets the upper hand. His building is conceived as a matrix-like entity in which human beings play the role of organs, protected by the body of the building. Here, Bénard gestures towards a body in which we can differentiate individual parts but which, when isolated, are stripped of meaning. This model was made by a machine of science fiction: a three-dimensional printer. This unique tool, referred to as a «replicating machine», is nowadays a source of much speculation, including the once impossible fantasy of synthetic duplication of any object by anybody, thereby ending the industrial age.

In the illustrated comic Freepolis, Marion Laval-Jantet and Jean-Sébastien Guiliani create a story that takes place in Equatorial Africa, in a future world where the power of plants as pharmacopoeia have become a major issue. Similar to the Seed Vault in Svalbard, this ultra secure «global seed vault» that references all the cultures on Earth, its purpose remains enigmatic, except that its very existence anticipates a major global disaster. It is also an opportunity to question the relations that our rationalist and scientistic companies maintain with cultures that count the invisible as part of their tangible world, cultures which have developed initiatory rites to reach this invisible realm, by means of rare natural psychotropics in particular, and in this case, an orchid.

It is the measurability of our world that interests Lily Hibberd and David Guez. Hibberd has transformed a piece of wood found in her garden into a bronze sculpture. A new kind of meter-standard, a measure of internal necessity, which is a pure and free desire; it is also an unpredictable object: a meter but with six centimeter segments, a simultaneously precise and absurd geometry. Conjuring duchampian pataphysics, of course, this work is a recollection of hours spent by the artist at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in the hermetism of experiments, it is obsolete because it references tools of ancient times, but it is also fascinated by the dexterity of these tools to display a decoding (or coding?) of the physical world.

David Guez also wonders about the tangibility of measurement when we go from the kilobyte (the very measure of the digital world) to historic standards. He proposes the reification of the dematerialization by computing in artistic objects which offer an abstract bridge between the virtual and the material.

With 84 Doors, Baden Pailthorpe experiments with mistakes and the loss of meaning through the concept of Newspeak. Google Translate is used as a writing device, translating the novel 1984 by George Orwell, through all 58 languages in Google’s translation machine, before returning it to English. The errors created by Google’s algorithms create a strange, new poetry, a linguistic remix that amplifies the ambiguities between fiction and science. In return, the artist makes this process visible in a strange data drawing that visualises this process with the first paragraph of the novel, which also becomes a new book, an absurd proofreading of the original text.

It is also a literary reference which is at the source of Sandra Aubry and Sébastien Bourg’s Stèle, as the inscription on this granite block is the last sentence from Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles (the planet belonged to them but «what does it mean exactly to possess a world?»). The artists seem at the same time to be positing the end of worlds, this gravestone suggests that the time for understanding is far too long to be compatible with the frenzied pace of exploration.

Ludovic Duchateau proposes a multi-form work. It is at the same time an installation consisting in built objects (suitcases containing objects to be manipulated), and a place to use them, participative performances for the audience, and photos. By appointment every Saturday, he will investigate a world that we shall build ourselves with these objects, one that that he hopes will be «the most transparent possible». Like a screen, this world will display our imaginations cleared of all the additional fictions which do not belong exclusively to us. This is a game for adults who play without knowing the rules, a box of archetypal constructions for abyssal compositions.

In addition to the exhibition, a symposium will be held on May 21 from 2:30 pm until 7:30 pm in the Auditorium at the Gaîté Lyrique, Paris. This symposium will investigate the theoretical questions that underpin this exhibition: the interweaving imagination of science and fiction. The speakers include Pierre Cassou-Nogues, Ludovic Duchateau, Jean-Noël Lafargue, Gwenola Wagon and myself.

Manuela de Barros

Opening Thursday 16th May - 5pm-9pm

Galerie de Roussan
10 rue Jouye-Rouve 75020 Paris
Opening from Thuesday to saturday from 2am-7pm
and by appointement
Admission free

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