Apposite Sustainability
October 16, 2019–February 1, 2020
LE CAP Saint-Fons, Espace culturel Léon Blum, Rue de la Rochette, F-69190 Saint-Fons
La Galerie/Espace d’art contemporain de Privas, Pôle de Bésignoles, route des Mines, F-07000 Privas
Curated by Julia Cistiakova, Ekaterina Shcherbakova, Nicolas Audureau
Apposite Sustainability stretches across two locations—La Galerie/Espace d’art contemporain du Théâtre de Privas and LE CAP Saint-Fons. Both parts of the exhibition are constructed as communicating vessels. It discusses the reshuffling of biological and production orders offering a number of scenarios, that tend to point out the surrogate systems of sustainability. The heuristic quest of four opens up a planetary perspective that provides a different relation to power, geography, and progression. The project’s dramaturgy refers to a notion of a “polyamory of place” that rejects both globalised and bioregionalist vision. A multilayered mapping set up in two spaces settles the approach that praises non-arrival, nomadism and polytheism, in other words—connection through differences. Starting from a question of how the planetary crisis of capitalocene could be solved, the project draws the algorithms of new production systems creation or adaptation of existing ones. Post-cortesian thinking denies the alienation between human beings and nature, seeking to build up metabolism of extra-human and extra natural.
Philipp Schwalb designs a visual structure overlapping the surfaces of the spaces taking as references the plates A, B, and C of the Mnemosyne Atlas of Aby Warburg. The first three plates of the Atlas that introduce the figure of homo cosmicus, and its relation to the external world, oscillates the opposition of rationality, magic, religion, and evolution. The painterly system involving all the surfaces of the rooms stages a system of knowledge that represents a meta reflection on the relationship between human, energy, philosophy, nature, god.
Dominique Koch presents two projects. In Privas, her video Perpetual Operator and object Dead Immortal Jellyfish examines the ceaseless economic cycle as an analogue of Turritopsis dohrnii life, the only known living organism that is able to regenerate endlessly and can be considered as “theoretically immortal.” The narrative is constructed via a discussion between the artist, the sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato and the philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi. A discourse on the sickness of looped economic system and the impact of social revolutions echoes the qualities of the immortal organism of a jellyfish, thus triggering thought-provoking proximity. In Saint-Fons in her recent video Holobiont Society, Dominique Koch presents radical positions of two theorists: American biologist and feminist Donna Haraway, and philosopher and sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato. The two juxtapositions create a tension in the film thus proposing to a spectator to think on new forms of resistance through mechanisms of domination and obfuscation.
The process-oriented practice of Nicolas Momein deconstructs the operations of manufacture production. Developing his proper know-how of soap making, the artist displays the bars as sculptural elements in Saint-Fons along with the Knots in Privas, forms reminding the process of making off. Metamorphose of materials and forms, an invention of his own recipes, the transformation of gestures, and experiments with materials refer to developmental biology that leads to the creation of specific morphological structures.
Benedikte Bjerre’s symbiotic set of works ironically comments on a simulation of reproduction cycles. Lisa’s chicken (Farm Life) in Privas, helium balloon sculptures are name tagged with the most popular names given to girls in France in 2019. The reference to a popular mobile game, it sparks a reflection on the loss of a real physical connection to food production and digitally spread paranoia about it. With the rhetoric the chicken or the egg causality dilemma, Bjerre produces a sculpture made of jelly fried eggs in CAP Saint-Fons.
With the generous support of ProHelvetia Swiss Arts Foundation and Danish Arts Foundation.
Double exhibition in Résonance of the Lyon Biennale.
October 16–December 19, 2019
La Galerie/Espace d’art contemporain du Théâtre de Privas
Pôle Bésignoles
Route de Mines
F-07000 Privas
Hours: Wednesday–Saturday 2–6pm
T +33 (0)9 70 65 01 15 / galerie.exposition [at] theatredeprivas.com
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December 14, 2019–February 1, 2020
LE CAP Saint-Fons
Rue de la Rochette
F-69190 Saint-Fons
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 2–6pm
T +33 (0)4 72 09 20 27 / centre.arts.plastiques [at] saint-fons.fr
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