Bonaventure (Trafiquer les mondes)

Artists: Meris Angioletti, Carlotta Bailly-Borg, Minia Biabiany, Gina Folly, Renaud Jerez, Boris Kurdi, Tarek Lakhrissi, Ghita Skali, Adrien Vescovi

Curator: Lilou Vidal

In a weakened world like our own, what can an artist do but create beings and worlds, question reality, repair or short-circuit history, heal and repopulate the imagination, make up new stories or pull the threads of possibilities buried in reality?

This exhibition presents works by a generation of artists with multifarious practices, preoccupied by tumultuous questions of society, identity and the planet, evolving in a murky era with an uncertain future, its haziness and unpredictability exacerbated by the current crisis.

In addition to their specific approaches, the artists taking part in this project seem to share an intuitive desire to draw freely from reality’s muddle of sources while questioning belief and systems’ transmission, in order to generate, in the spirit of an act of resistance, an experience of unpredictability, an alternative and poetic imagination, as well as new, unusual forms and stories.

The cheerful title Bonaventure dissimulates the ambiguity of the double meaning, while the positive tone given to that marginalised divinatory practice called “fortune telling” (“dire la bonne aventure”)—predicting a person’s fate whether good or bad—cannot hide the opacity of doubt and the uncertainty of an unsettling future, even amid promises and expectations of a better life.

In the face of various ravages (ecological, social and mental) (1) committed in the name of the concept of “progress” imposed by patriarchal and capitalist societies, other forms of knowledge and belief from popular or minorized cultures—giving themselves the right to make up another life—seem to have re-emerged and rediscovered their restorative function.

The title of this project refers to clairvoyance, invention and alterity no less than to the craftiness of “illusion peddlers” (2) (as the church authorities called the nomadic Tzigane women of the 15th century—who read people’s future in the lines of their hand in exchange for a few coins—probably fearing they might overly liberate the dominant powers), to the counterfeiting of knowledge, and to the establishment of new dissident narratives.

These artists come together on the verge a darkly humorous enchantment and on the threshold of certain “speculative fabulations” (3). Like gatherers on the margins of the world, they cultivate methods and stories “full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions; full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don’t understand.” (4)

Bonaventure leads us into a liminal episode of metamorphosis, sharing and mediating with the unknown, a moment of intimate exchange with others, in opacity, doubt, and the coincidence of possibilities.

—Lilou Vidal, curator of the 22nd edition of the Pernod Ricard Foundation Prize.

(1) The correlation between mental ecology, social ecology and environmental ecology was developed by Félix Guattari in his book The Three Ecologies, first published in 1989.
(2) Nicole Edelman, Histoire de la voyance et du paranormal, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1995, p. 9.
(3) Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016. See the concept of SF: String Figures, Science Fact, Science Fiction, Speculative Feminism, Speculative Fabulation, So Far.
(4) Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 1986. In this essay, based on the observation that civilisation is inspired by heroic and tragic stories in which violence and fights with spears and swords prevail, the author explores other narrative possibilities based on the “carrier bag theory” formulated by Elisabeth Fisher, modelled on the receptacle, and on un-hierarchical, anti-heroic and inclusive contents.