Marie Lorenz: Confluence / Gaëlle Cognée: La frontière ne dort jamais

“Please bring strange things. / Please come bringing new things. / Let very old things come into your hands. / Let what you do not know come into your eyes. / Let desert sand harden your feet. / Let the arch of your feet be the mountains. / Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps / And the ways you go be the lines of your palms. / Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing / And your outbreath be the shining of ice. / May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words. / May you smell food cooking you have not eaten. / May the spring of a foreign river be your navel. / May your soul be at home where there are no houses [1].”

Confluence by Marie Lorenz (b. in 1973, Twentynine Palms, California. Works in Brooklyn, New York) and La frontière ne dort jamais by Gaëlle Cognée (b. in 1988, Ancenis, Loire-Atlantique. Works in Corsaint, Côte d’Or) explore the notions of common goods and places. Observing the relationships between an environment and the organisms that inhabit it, the artists see their subjects as fellow travelers, from whom it is possible to move reality towards a poetics. They adopt an anthropological posture of “participant observation [through which] the correspondence, whether with people or with other things, is a labour of giving back what we owe to the human and non-human beings with which and with whom we share our world, for our own existence and formation [2].” By surveying territories, they produce new narratives like storytellers.

The exhibitions highlight the urgent need to reappropriate controversial subjects in a sensitive and cultural way, while preserving the dissensus [3] they imply. Indeed, “[artists’] interpretations are themselves real changes when they transform the forms of visibility of a common world and, with them, the capacities that any bodies can exercise on a new common landscape [4]”. So, these goods and places of the common are as many sources of inspiration as they are tools with which to reflect on the complex and delicate relationships we maintain with our territories, our histories, our ecosystems, our habitat and our fellow human beings.

Confluence and La frontière ne dort jamais deal with our relationship with the “non-human”, with subjects whose “savagery” is read through their capacity for metamorphosis, which upsets the “order of things”. The artists’ practices create spaces for contemporary socio-political issues and the dissensus they produce, incorporating their capacity to go beyond boundaries, displace them and create new ones. —Adeline Lépine, Curator of the exhibition

[1] Ursula K. LeGuin, “Initiation Song from the Finders’ Lodge” in Always Coming Home, Harper and Row, New York City, 1985.
[2] Tim Ingold, “Art and Anthropology for a Living World”, conference script for the seminar Prendre le parti des choses. Publications hybrides sur les processus de création by Ensadlab in May 2018.
[3] Dissensus must not only shake up the map of the given, but also institute new relationships between elements, opening new possibilities.
[4] Translated in English from French by the author: Jacques Rancière Politique de la littérature, Éditions Galilée, Paris, 2007

*Marie Lorenz’s exhibition is supported by Etant donnés, a program of the Villa Albertine, co-produced with RIB, a contemporary art venue in Rotterdam (Netherlands), and endorsed by Pays d’Agglomération de Montbéliard, Capitale Française de la Culture 2024.

*Gaëlle Cognée’s exhibition is endorsed by Pays d’Agglomération de Montbéliard, Capitale Française de la Culture 2024. The artist is particularly grateful to the Archives Municipales and Médiathèque de Montbéliard, as well as the Coopératives des Savoirs du Nivernais Morvan and the Maison du Patrimoine Oral de Bourgogne.