The sibylline intentions expressed to those invited to take part in the project reflected the intuitions of this ambition, subtitled Nef des marges dans le ombre des certitudes. They included of a fleeting temporality in a space that needed to be ennobled and stripped of its finery. to be stripped of its jewel-like finery - gestures, acts, around projects dealing with time, trace the imprint.
Marcel Scwhob's twilight prose Le Livre de Monelle was haunting, and its call for pure knowledge of the moment inspired the implementation of what is intended to last only a short time sufficiently powerful to aspire to an experience lived hic et nunc and that in its wake images and sensations. These intentions were expressed just a few weeks before, in the very heart of Europe, the word and some people were tragically confronted with the threat of annihilation.
In this context, the prodromal and anticipatory dimension of contemporary art contemporary art, which says something about our times in ways other than the literal...
... Living in ruins ... The works that cohabit the gallery space for some 216 hours irreversibly metamorphose it; from the dislocated motorway that links the interior and exterior spaces, from the truncated protrusion that scarifies the floor, to the installation made of scraps and offcuts that, like a proliferating organism, invades its entrance, the space is dismantled, destabilised and as if restored to its full potential and power. In place of the conquering dreams of demiurge artists and their aspirations for sanctuary, this space is home to something else: fragility, humility, density, and a strong presence of elements and materials: Sand, fire, water, wind, iron, aluminium... ... let each of us make use of our own ruins... Many of the original works presented and conceived in-situ proceed from a form of "repotentialisation", of rearrangements of elements and materials. Bypassing the need to adjust to a logic of vertical ascent, they play on repetition and iteration. A magnification of wear and tear at a time of saturated aestheticism and hypertrophy Some of them call for their own disappearance and deterioration.
As a kind of counter-order to the heritage fetishism of the age of programmed obsolescence, they are intended to be the vestiges of liquid time. Ontologically, these works purge themselves of any reference to the essentialization of things. stubborn denials of immutability. By re-characterising reality, by asserting an assumed self-determination, these works hack into probabilities. According to modal realism in analytic metaphysics, our world is one of many possible worlds, which cannot claim to be one of anything. cannot claim any ontological pre-eminence over the others. Each world is interconnected by an infinity of possible worlds, each a new constellation of stipulated, arrested elements. These works are, in a sense and in themselves, world theory fictions, to use Lubomir Dolozel's expression. Lubomir Dolozel. They are fractal universes that allow us to grasp the vertiginous entanglement of the world and all its fascinating instability. Complexity, spatio-temporal reality, duration and uchrony are also at the heart of the works that make up these Hours. in the works that make up these Heures Sauvages.
A hypnotic choreographic whirlwind performed by two desynchronised machines - a perpetual flame a perpetual flame irrigated by a drop by drop of petrol - a crystallised object - a probable face a crystallised object - a probable face completing the tracery of a fault - like so many allusions to the infinite and the perpetual. The duration that of the life of other living species, that of the cost of artificial cultivation in a closed environment of an ecosystem. Memories and evocations too: The memory of black lands and ancestral practices, the memory of a 3,000 km crossing to a No Women's land - the evocation, through a spider's web woven of gold, of artificial paradises and the thrill of escape Uchrony It could have been... old paintings and engravings on which an image of our contemporary reality is irreversibly affixed our contemporary reality is irreversibly affixed - foundations that are ancient only by virtue of their metaphor L'échappée A resin rope that destroys any attempt to climb it in a bid for desertion. Each of the works surveys and probes possible trajectories, modelling abysses.
None of them are descriptive, and all of them are what Alfred North Whitehead called "bait for feelings". for feelings". Is every artistic gesture testamentary, even one that disappears into a fading space? Should what matter remain? Is what has value conditional on what resists erasure? From precarious installations to those that allow time to be measured in a way other than in its ideal-typical linear way of linearity, to the denial of supremacist points of view, the question of knowing to use Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's words, how we are to thrive in precarious and devastated environments devastated environments, how to develop new alliances with urgency and consequently how to ultimately, how to make meaning.
Enter these Wild Hours
Participating artists: Angyvir Padilla, Anne-Marie Maes, Brognon Rollin, DISNOVATION.ORG, Félix Luque Sanchez, Lucie Lanzini, Lucile Bertrand, Maëlle Dufour, mountaincutters, Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil, Sabrina Montiel-Soto, Simon Nicaise, Sébastien Reuzé, Tatiana Wolska, Thomas Garnier, Tony Regazzoni, Maarten Vanden Eynde.