Hello, I am an independent self-taught curator based in Paris. I conceive exhibitions as performative protocols that can be activated by myself or others, unfolding through contingent interactions rather than static display. My curatorial practice is drawn to artistic strategies that embrace destruction, material transformation, and participatory engagement, questioning the exhibition space and its possibilities.
For several years, I have been conducting an ongoing research on disasters and their iconographies, focusing on the ways catastrophes are aestheticized, archived, and re-enacted within artistic and curatorial discourses. This inquiry extends to the traces of lost, vanished, or missing artworks, culminating in the Oblivion Collection, a participatory online archive dedicated to gathering remnants and spectral evidence of disappeared art. By engaging with the visual and conceptual residues of destruction, my curatorial research interrogates what remains, what is forgotten, and how disappearance itself might become an artistic gesture.
Francis Alÿs, Jessica Bardsley, Michel Blazy, Claude Cattelain, Edith Dekyndt, Jérôme Cognet, Francesco Jodice, Hans Op de Beeck, Olivier Sévère, Julie Vacher
Statement
“The end of the world does not concern me; I can live without it.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The analogy is well known: if we reduce the duration of the universe's existence proportionally to a 24-hour day, the big bang occurs at midnight and one second, planet Earth is formed at around 16:00 and humanity only appears at 23:59:59. Lost in this vast temporal scale, we are not much, but we do have the power to permanently upset the planetary balance. This selection of video art pays tribute to the most implausible blockbuster ever produced, a film more than 4.5 billion years long: the biopic of our planet.
The synopsis is most appealing: perpetual, silent recomposition of continents, mountains and oceans; repeated extinction of living organisms; magmatic explosions and rock tremors. A geological time that far exceeds all human understanding, and that no soul will ever be able to experience from beginning to end. An immutable force that is at the origin of everything we see, and that will outlive us if we continue to inhabit the world as we do today. The first moving image ever produced is mental and intimate. Anyone who has stared at a motionless object for any length of time has experienced the trembling sensation that agitates our vision. After a while, the observed reality seems to be subject to retinal spasms and optical oscillations, like a disturbed visual persistence. A fleeting pleasure that disappears as quickly as we rub our eyes or move our pupils.
No doubt it was this distraction that certain Japanese aesthetes sought by surrounding themselves with suisekui. These sinuous rock fragments mounted on pedestals are elevated to the status of works of art. They are reminiscent of a craggy landscape and are examined at length during meditation sessions. These rocks are a condensed landscape, a summary of our long mineral history. Perhaps it's for these very qualities that some of the artists in this selection have made rock the heroine of their videos. Whether sculpted, talking or wandering, rock is a witness to time immemorial and primitive.
At the other end of the arrow of time, in the last second of the dial, the human race appears. If the generations that preceded us were those of pyramids, walls and cathedrals, ours is the generation of polymers, pesticides and other endocrine disruptors. Our soils are polluted, our ecosystems dysregulated, our landscapes scarred, yet we continue to exist in a capitalist, extractivist and dominant system as if nothing had happened. An unbearable inaction that is at the root of some of the videos presented here. If, alas, too many of us look the other way, these artists bring us face to face with the reality of a world destroyed or on the brink of destruction. Other artists show us what soon will be no more, in sequences of marvelous plant simplicity.
The Apocalypse Clock tries to warn us of the imminence of the end of time. On this dial, it is programmed for midnight. The hands move backwards or forwards according to the imminence of the existential dangers facing our species. The scientific council in charge of it regularly updates it. At the time of writing, it stands at 23:58:30, following the war in Ukraine and the approach of ecological disasters. This leaves us only 90 symbolic seconds to enjoy earthly pleasures. May these final seconds be those of 25 arts seconds!