19 Oct Kin(d) Relations
EXHIBITION
Group exhibition
A proposal by Julie Crenn, based on the composition of the EMAP Group Show 2022
From November 5 to December 30, 2022
Antre Peaux – Transpalette
Free
Open from Wednesday to Sunday from 3pm to 7pm
Vernissage on Saturday, November 5 at 6.18 p.m.
Guest artists
Artists from the EMAP 2022 residencies Stefanie Schroeder & Juliane Jaschnow, Paula Kaori Nishijima, Charlotte Jarvis
Artists from previous EMAP residencies (5) / Margherita Pevere, Kat Austen, Liliana Zeic, Uh513 (María Castellanos et Alberto Valverde)
Artistes guests / Cécile Beau, Annabel Guérédrat, Josèfa Ntjam, Laëtitia Bourget, Shu Lea Cheang
In the occidental thought history, humans think of themselves at the top of the living organization as a species superior to the others, even as a species existing outside nature. The dualism made between nature and culture carved up separating furrows between the inhabitants of the earth. The term “nature” is, for far too long, a modern occidental thought that places humans in a position exterior to the living. “Nature”, as a concept, is a territory to exploit, to destroy, to remodel, to colonize, to dominate for the enrichment of the most powerful. This territory is reduced to a resource. Opposed to that of “culture” the nature concept authorizes the destruction, the control, the power, and the hierarchised organization of the living. Thus, the individuals minorised by the hetero patriarchy have been relegated to the nature territory. They have been separated from humanity by means of subpoena in order to be exploited, violated, kept quiet, objectified, invisibilised in the same manner as the animals, the plants, the ground, or the oceans. “Little by little, the huge evidence has [...] appeared to me that a society which defined its dignity as opposed to a nature indicates that it could but generate ruin and disaster around it. The idea that the universe is dead (made of matter, without life or mind) is a major pillar of modern science, its authority, and its very existence. The idea of a living universe would impose besides a lot of ethic limits to its exploration; we do not do the autopsy of a living being. [...] This idea of nature as a dead universe makes the Occident an anthropological curiosity.”[3]
Deborah Bird Rose (anthropologist) adds to this: “The Nature/culture dualism occupies a privileged place. Culture designates human beings whereas nature refers to the rest of the non-human living. Widening the gap, the human transcends and dominates all that is different from it, and the separation is especially critical that the animals are the creatures most close to us, by their faces, their forms, and their attitudes.”[4] They have made tools, dogmas, religions and sciences to legitimate what Val Plumwood (eco-feminist philosopher) calls the “hyper-separations” between living beings, visible and invisible. These hyper-separations contribute to a binary thought, anthropo-centered and destructive. Since the years 1960 until today, the ecological, eco-feminist, post-colonial, decolonial, queer or eco-sexual opinions propose joyful and urgent alternatives to this monolith thought. Thoughts that reactivate the poetic / political charge of what nature is: “that is born, that grows, that creates”.[5] Thus, at the anthropocene, we have made the choice to the Chthulucene (Donna Haraway) and its concept of natureculture. The human, “which is literally the humus, the earthy”, is not separated from the living.[6] Then, the act is to link, to think the relationships (Édouard Glissant) that exist between us all. Of enlianating us (Dénètem Touam Bona) to feel and live these profound links that constitute us and that transform us permanently. To think of the living as a super-organism that has been made in an extremely long time and where all bodies affect one another.
Kin(d) Relations. The title of the exhibition articulates the notion of kin (kinship) developed by Donna Haraway and the thought of the Relationship by Édouard Glissant. Kin(d) Relations is this way thought as a poly-ecosystem where human and non-human bodies affect themselves mutually (Deborah Bird Rose). Through the experience of the works, the exhibition expresses the manners in which we affect all, the interdependencies, the rhizomes, and the symbiosis of our visible and invisible existences. “The rhizome notion would be what I call the poetry of the Relationship, according to which all identity extends in a link to the Other. [...] It is as well that the poetry of the Relationship is never conjectural and does suppose no ideology fixity. It contradicts the comfortable insurances linked to the supposed excellence of a language. Latent poetry, open, multilingual of intention, in touch with all the possible. The theoretician thought, concerning the fundamental and the foundation, which it connects to the truth, is evasive in front of these uncertain paths.”[7] Kin(d) Relations manifests an attention culture, where humans are considered neither at the centre nor at the top of a system. They act within their habitat as well as all other species and entities. It’s not a matter of talking about cohabitation, but about coexistence of a terrestrial community animated by multiple realities.
Archipelagos – rhizomes – tentacles – kinship – partner species – allied / These notions, as poetical than political, upset the dogmas that structure the occidental thoughts. They invite us to “rethink what it means to accompany, protect, to be in danger, what is to live, not only what is “life”, but what is vulnerability, to live and to die, take certain types of risks to be in the company of or for certain modes of life rather than others. [...] A partner species is not synonym of good or harmony. It is not synonym of anything. It is an interrogation; it is a provocation to the response-hability and even more to the response capacity. To become endangered with. Thereby, in this sense, to affirm the relationality of the partner species is not a position traditionally human, even though it involves the human capacities. I think that the relationality of the partner species is not anti-human, but it is not conventionally humanistic in the sense where the human beings would be the source of a response or value.”[8][8]
The works presented at the Transpalette generate interlacing, enlianating, meetings, interdependencies (between works, proposals, but also between visitors), symbiosis alliances, real and speculative kinship situations. From a bacterium to the earth’s crust, going through odours, oceans, gases, cells, frequencies, hormones, or even light sources, it is the whole of the living that is thought and lived as a porous community, empathetic, protector, wanting, affective, more than a human thought of an eco-feminist nature, intersectional, queer and decolonial. A terrestrial community that, beyond the tangible realities, the artists explore to propose projections, fictions as well fed by a narrative speculation (Ursula Le Guin) which is not a simple literary tool, but a manner of making possibles. A collective and exhilarating thought that leads us to push printed limits that surround and constrain our fantasies. A thought fed of unexpected, unpredictable, and necessary relationships. It is thus that the link to the new technologies and to the sciences becomes the fertile ground of illimited and multiple worlds. In this sense, the intertwining’s between the organic and the technological generate openings cheerfully surprising within the real. They cause new realities within which it is permitted to experiment invisible and infinite dimensions that Glissant names the totality, this immense community of the livings with which we have to learn to reconcile ourselves.