Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni: The Everted Capital (Katabasis)

For ten years now, Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni have been producing a protean body of work whose films, performances and sculptures present alternative hypotheses about our past and future as opportunities to transform ourselves in the present.

In 2014, in a first monographic exhibition at Casino Luxembourg—Forum d’art contemporain, the artists presented the first three episodes of season 1 of the longterm series The Unmanned. Four years later, in 2018, the exhibition 2045–1542 (A History of Computation) revisited the entirety of season 1 in an installation composed of eight videos tracing a subjective history of computing in reverse. Now, in 2022, the artists are taking over the Casino spaces for a third time to present all of the films and sculptures that comprise seasons 2 and 3 of the projects The Everted Capital and The Form of Not. This new cycle, conceived as a performative speculation on the future of value, attempts to produce, through each episode and its working protocols, a fictional alternative to the history of capital.

The exhibition presented at Casino Luxembourg in 2022 is twofold, conceived both as the global presentation of The Everted Capital and The Form of Not and as a set for the shooting of an endless epilogue to their series. During the entire run, the Casino spaces will become the setting of a concrete fiction in which, joined by means of a vertical traveling shot, the different layers of their speculation will be aligned with the present: dismantled Earth, sleeping immortals, molten money, newborn becoming “more than life.”

The Everted Capital (Epilogue)
The epilogue to the series will be filmed in the spaces of Casino Luxembourg and incorporated into the exhibition halfway through the run, in June 2022. With a hole pierced vertically from attic to basement, the museum presents on each floor elements used to portray the fictions that make up the films of The Everted Capital. From floor to floor, layer by layer, collected and commingled, there are elements of the prologue of season 2 (improbable ecosystem combining minerals, plants and animals utilized as currency throughout human history before the invention, 2,500 years ago, of government-issued metal coins, still used today); salt money employed by the children in the first episode, and by their parents, immortal communists now sleeping in the museum’s spaces; remains of the 3,000-year hostage-taking in the second episode, debris of the world which, filmed live and interpreted by an artificial intelligence system, disclose the face of a newborn that the fiction pronounces “more than life;” lastly, a real child, the son of the actress of the final episode, born of the year-long experience of filming in the confines of a god-training laboratory. It is all these elements, assembled, overlapping and arranged together like sedimentary strata of the fictions, through which the camera moves in its endless descent.

Curator: Kevin Muhlen assisted by Stilbé Schroeder.
Casino Luxembourg is financially supported by : Ministère de la Culture, Luxembourg.
Exhibition supported by: ING Luxembourg.