Gina Folly: The Simple Life

Gina Folly’s exhibition The Simple Life is produced in partnership with the Centre culturel suisse. On tour in Metz (May 2024).

Without defining itself through a preferred medium, Gina Folly’s art practice latches onto the details of human conditions of existence, observing contemporary social organization, the private and public constructions of individuals’ lives. Social pressures, indirect injunctions through ruses such as manipulation, seduction within the everyday environment (advertising, legislation, religion or ethics) emerge as obvious to the artist within this environment. From these observations derive artforms that attempt to reflect these various kinds of interhuman relationships in their technical environment, with animals, consumer products, or standards of living.

The domestication of animals by humans, for their consumption or issues of conservation of endangered species, involves coercive systems such as cages, imposed directions of traffic, collars and other means of control, which Gina Folly’s creations indirectly link to those that humanity imposes on itself. In the framework of her exhibition at the Contemporary Art Centre – La Synagogue de Delme – the artist focused on the case of a floating farm located in the port of Rotterdam1 on which dozens of cows live and graze. The first floating farm for producing cows’ milk, it is a structure designed to dock at city ports, to produce milk directly on site and avoid long circuits, thus providing a viable solution to a lack of land in certain territories. A startling update of the Noah’s Ark story, this farm is self-sufficient and proposes a model that’s reproducible on a grand scale, for the future of agriculture. For the exhibition The Simple Life, the synagogue becomes both the receptacle and twin of this farm, recalling the past of the Jewish community of Delme (which, at one time, had to farm cattle, since they were forbidden from owning land) but also the architectural shape of the building is reminiscent of the floating farm, since it resembles a transparent cube. Here, we find photographs from inside the floating farm, documenting the daily life of the cows and the extraction of the milk. The images are printed onto wooden planks, like those of Ikea furniture®. The artist also presents here some transparent polycarbonate boxes, copies of the ones used at zoos to feed monkeys, which, in the artistic context, resemble strangely empty minimalist sculptures. They evoke both the transparency of the buildings of business districts and the unsettling atmosphere of a behavioral experience yet to come. At the heart of this exhibition, the artist questions these models of non-soil agriculture for the future, in their utopian dimension verging on the absurd (animals cut off from the land and from nature; the utopian vision of a model that would struggle to adapt to the population levels of modern cities – a contemporary Noah’s Ark or a new financial godsend?) with the vital distance that humor provides for a Swiss artist photographing dairy cows.

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