Infantia (1894-7231)
February 21–May 3, 2020
Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni create a multifaceted work in which films, performances and sculptures present alternative hypothesis of our past and future as so many possibilities for transforming us in the present.
After The Unmanned, a series of 8 films which retrace the History of computation in reverse, the artists have been working on a second cycle called The Everted Capital since 2018. This new project, conceived as a performative speculation on the future of value, attempts to produce, through each episode and via the protocols that they unfold, a fiction which exists as an alternative to that of capital.
Infantia is the exhibition of a birth.
Before becoming a museum, the IAC was a school. The school has become a child.
Within this child’s body, there is: a sunset at midday, immortal communists sleeping under a rain of salt, death as atavism, Lydian kings and money. In addition to this: a hostage situation lasting 3000 years, a dismantled earth, a starless night, an uprooted tree, Richard Nixon and the void.
Within this museum-child, each thing, each object, is the trace of an exchange, the remains of a fiction of value. The museum-child contains all exchanges but cannot be reduced to any one of them, because while everything within it can be exchanged, it can be exchanged for nothing. And though later the child grows, its infancy will not be a “before,” this age that we grown-ups have lost: not the inestimable value of infancy, a time before exchange and accounts; but the infancy of value itself.
At IAC, Infantia (1894-7231) presents for the first time in France, the prologue to The Everted Capital along with its first two episodes. Each of these films, with a run time of around 24 hours, shows bodies tested by a repeated fiction and its gradual transformation under the effect of time of the inevitable fatigue of its protagonists.
For the exhibition, the protocols at work in the films are restituted in the space.
The objects which emerge, like the detritus of fictions, compose the body of a child. An articulated body, in movement, that the visitor goes through, in turn tested by the fiction and the hypothesis of another world carried within it.
Extracts from the artists’ films are available on their site: www.theunmanned.com
The exhibition is conceived in collaboration with Okayama Art Summit 2019 and the Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain
Guest Curator:
Anne Stenne
Art Direction:
Nathalie Ergino, Director of the IAC
Assisted by Elli Humbert, Exhibition and Project Manager
