“Unstable landscapes, captured in a desynchronized round of time [representing] new ecosystems in which the visitor is invited to immerse himself.”1 Such are the works of the Pinault Collection at the Bourse de Commerce in its new exhibition, initiated “against the backdrop of climate disruption, in the urgency of our present as in the eye of a hurricane.”
Dark gardens and obscure areas, “biotopes in mutation” and “micro-territories in gestation” plunge us into the wastelands of post-modernity, far from our lost paradises…
In the concrete cylinder of the rotunda, Danh Vo’s trees with crutches have grown. Branches uprooted by storms representing all the “decay of the world.” A “green hell” reminiscent of those “to be eradicated” during the Vietnam War. Not far away, Diana Theater’s Chernobyl “takes us into an irradiated landscape, an apocalyptic and radioactive theatre,” mixing beauty and toxicity of a contaminated nature filmed in the highly radioactive exclusion zone of Chernobyl, while Hicham Berrada’s Présage immerses us in a mutant visual landscape: filmed in real time, the degradation of metals immersed in an aquarium under the action of corrosive substances draws a chaos of decaying forms: a hypnotic metamorphic ballet.
No less destabilizing is Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s sound piece, in which the sound of invisible tropical rain resounds in the staircase in the image of the predicted climate catastrophe. Another chaos, “an entropic site where the ground rises up, where industrial residues contaminate the earth, where fragments of asphalt choke the vegetation while uprooted trees decompose in the mud, Pierre Huyghes’ A Way in Untilled, created in a fallow park in Kassel, projects us into a muddy dystopian world haunted by dogs with fuchsia-pink paws, strewn with yellow and purple plants that seem to herald some new kind of germination and pollination and open up the prospect of a new post-human era. There is no man either in the vedute, tiny landscapes on borrowed time, enclosing in their toxic sfumati and glazes their “possible fading.”
Stéphanie Dulout
1 Quotes from Emma Lavigne, curator of the exhibition, taken from the catalogue.
Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection
2, rue de Viarmes, Paris I
From 8 February
