Artists: Ánima Correa, Patricia Domínguez, Katja Novitskova, Timur Si-Qin, Jenna Sutela

The forest lights up, the ocean gains ground, the earth rumbles and the wind blows ever stronger. It would seem that we have failed in our ritual, that the spirits of the living and the non-living feel scorned. The race for development has hastened us to turn our environment into a resource, to wither the gifts of past harmony and forget the ancestors who forged our history. Can we repair the ritual?

Et la guêpe entra dans la figue (And the wasp entered the fig) brings together artistic practices that explore alternatives to a linear vision of time and connect worlds that are often pitted against each other. They invoke ancestral technologies and hybridise technology and the living. Could it be that the capacity for adaptation, multiplication and hybridisation of species thousands of years old are technologies in themselves? In their search for non-human allies, some of them unicellular, invisibilised ancestral knowledge and augmented spiritualities, these artists are calling for a return to equilibrium, where humanity can learn again to live in symbiosis with its environment.

The title of the exhibition is inspired by the symbiotic relationship between the agaonid wasp and the fig tree, a mutualism born of thousands of years of co-evolution. The fig is its floral receptacle, which only it can penetrate. It is there that it is born, lays its eggs and decomposes. This interdependence also benefits the fig tree, whose pollen is dispersed.

The Earthware series by Katja Novitskova reveals infinite, non-linear visions of the evolution of our world. The wildebeest in Earthware 06.10.2017 faces us. Its glittering, almost digital gaze responds to the technology that has captured its image. Three visions are superimposed: the nyctalope automatic camera acts as an intermediary between the animal and human visions.(1) We find ourselves becoming spies for an immemorial technology as we observe this species that has adapted to survive and reproduce in a complex ecosystem; or perhaps it is the species that is observing us. This uncertain feeling is amplified in Earthware (Dreaming of Laurasiatheria), 2022, in which a hybrid mammal monitors us.(2) By mimicry - one machine reproducing another - algorithms have given shape to a new trans-species entity. The synthetic clay tablet on which the image is reproduced becomes the portal to a non-human vision, where the animal world reclaims its place as an ultimate technology. A technology once honoured on cave walls.

1 With a population of over 1.3 million, the wildebeest have the largest mammal population in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park.
2 A type of biome characterised by the presence of a majority of trees whose leaves fall with the seasons.

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