MCD's blog

EXTREMES’ UTOPIA

 
  Polar, spatial or polluted zones, what spaciousness today for the extreme environments? Can art be an indicator of our capacity to occupy them? For its tenth edition, the @rt Outsiders festival followed its reflection on a world where the man would become totally aware of his connection with those universes, hostile of familiar, to discover or to protect…

New forms of transdisciplinarity
Events like @rt Outsiders, reinventing in their own way new forms of transdisciplinarity are rare. Far from limiting themselves to the unique production or presentation of the pieces of art problematic, this event induces us more to think. An original thinking, wanted by its mentors Annick Bureaud and Jean-Luc Soret like a crossroads of art and new technologies, of human sciences and environment issues. An exploratory field that naturally finds its place at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, a place that in essence claims to be the vector of an suggestive reflection where the image reality produces imaginary mental projections, and therefore considerations that can sometimes be utopian.

For its 2009 edition (from 09/09 to 11/10), reflection and utopia were therefore rhyming with (In)Habitable ? L’art des environnements extrêmes ((Un) Inhabitable? The art of extreme environments),and were proceeding of a strong contradictory logic: the initial extreme zones (space, polar zones) potentially become more and more inhabitable while our societies become extremes. Icing on this slightly bitter cake: these are the same technological tools that consecrate this contradictory movement. Nuclear energy, highly technological progress, are supporting the impulse and the realm of possibilities in matters or the spatial conquest for example, but it’s as well because of them that tragedies like Tchernobyl make entire zones uninhabitable.

Reflective mirrors
In consequence, the works presented were as reflective mirrors. On one side there was the artistic translation of the environmental abyss of our highly technical societies. In the Sounds From Dangerous Places, Chernobyl by Peter Cusack, sound sequences were enlightening in a ghostly way pictures of fixed places, letting the danger appear behind a seeming tranquility. In Altitude Zero by Hu Jie Ming, the viewer by looking in a porthole was making surface obvious traces of sea pollution…

On the other side, reflections on tomorrow’s housing were revealing themselves in all their poetical attitude. The idea of the garden carried in space was floating in weightlessness in the installation EPO4 – Dewey’s Forest by Shiro Matsui, or in the symbolized shape of the Rose de Mars, exhibited in its Martian atmosphere simulation box beam, by Howard Boland and Laura Cinti. In Singular Oscillations, it’s Bradley Pitts’ body that was floating in weightlessness, in the space, searching for a new immersion in another environment.

Antarctic, utopia land
Already tackled in the 2008 edition, the case of the Antarctic that crystallizes conflicts and reflections seems to contain all these issues sometimes strangely complementary. As the last utopian place of the planet – being a territory belonging to the whole humanity restricted to pacific activities, as stipulated in the Antarctic Treaty of 1959 and in the Madrid Protocol-, it arouses the interest of artists. All the more because we are in the International Polar Year and their presence on the most austral land of the planet was particularly supported by institutions like the Institut Paul-Émile Victor in France… In consequence, @rt Outsiders 2009 presented with pertinence some pieces of art opening up this Antarctic land to practices of artistic valorization.

Sound practices, with the American artist Andrea Polli, who translates in Sonic Antarctica different scientific and climatic data in a soundtrack in which natural recordings and extracts of interviews with scientists about global warming are also incorporated. Human practices, with Colonisation 2041 by Catherine Rannou, addition of written and audiovisual documents showing the development of scientific stations in Antarctic, and therefore the progressive urbanization of this continent. Finally political and sociological practices, with the set up of the Antarctic universal passport by Lucy and Jorge Orta, process supported in situ by their Antarctic village, modular tents made of flags and clothes sewed to illustrate the multiplicity and diversity of people. How if the consensus for a more livable world was for once going through the extremes…?

Laurent Catala 

Website: www.art-outsiders.com

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