Andy Rankin



        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.

Get updated herehello@andyrank.in


StudioPoush
153 Avenue Jean Jaures
93300 Aubervilliers Represented bypal project
39 Rue de Grenelle
75007 Paris

L’ombre des montagnes avance



Location

Le Sprinkler
121 Rue du Parc
93130 Noisy-le-Sec


Dates

25 May 2024
02 June 2024



Photo credits

Lou Motin


Artist

Lou Motin

Statement


A few months ago, the International Union of Geological Sciences announced that we were not living in the Anthropocene. For this group of scientists in charge of delimiting geological eras, the imprint of human activity on the Earth system is taking place in a time that is far too short to be named specifically. However this long time, a troubled and uncertain future, is already here. It is foreshadowed in the works of artist Lou Motin. By hacking into the codes of contemporary archaeology and museography, he combines the present with the past. Lou Motin then takes advantage of these newly-created temporal interstices to slip in narratives, fictions and poetry, like so many clues proving that the stigmata of the activity of our industrial societies go far beyond the understanding of those who produced them.

Lou Motin's works play with our perceptions, as in the ‘Fragments du Giec’ series. This collection of fragmentary industrial rocks, engraved with indecipherable series of 1s and 0s, is a binary translation of the latest IPCC report. By engraving this report in blocks of salvaged bricks, Lou Motin is safeguarding it for future generations, taking particular care to make it indecipherable for those who don't have the same reading codes as computer systems. This report outlines the catastrophic situation facing our planet, with numerous sources, calculations and diagrams, and is undoubtedly one of the most important pieces of writing of our time. Unfortunately, not many people are interested in it. By engraving them in a seemingly hermetic alphabet, Lou Motin covers these pieces of wall with a veil of mystery, making them as attractive as a Rosetta Stone to decipher. Moreover, the IPCC report prophesies a coming “apocalypse”, a term that has never been so apt to characterise a body of work of art, since it means “unveiling; revelation” in ancient Greek. 

A similar mechanism is at work in the ensemble ‘Question de point de vue’. These half-dozen directional signs, designed in-place for a park, are being previewed at ‘L'ombre des montagnes avance’. They foretell dark omens, an inescapable nuclear catastrophe. They sketch out a landscape to come, ravaged by the force of radioactivity unleashed by human domestication. A force that will sooner or later turn on those who try to manipulate it. Metal is the material of choice to withstand such a cataclysm over the long term, as if to prove to those who survive that we know the dangers we ourselves have created. 

‘Fouilles’ is a work that is also aimed at future generations. The artist stages an archaeological dig revealing the scars formed by the millions of kilometres of asphalt roads criss-crossing the surface of planet Earth. Almost 250kg of artificial rock is surgically cut into an almost perfect square. On some of these slabs, Lou Motin has inscribed a random alphabet that is impossible to decipher. These tarry traces will survive for millions more years, and there will probably not be many people left to put them into any kind of context. These stigmata of our deadly industrialisation, evidence of a crime that is not yet complete, can be read as the coming epilogue to the history of humanity: an end, a fall, that will know no readers. 

‘L'ombre des montagnes avance’ is an exhibition made up of a rocky amalgam of lithic works produced by Lou Motin in recent years. A dark environment from which the human figure is systematically absent, but whose trace is omnipresent, a stratigraphy that heralds our doom destiny. The spirit of our times is marked by uncertainty. Between the fall of the Soviet empire and that scheduled for the American empire, the systemic disturbances caused by human activity, and the crumbling of our Western democracies, everything reminds us of our ephemerality. Rome wasn't built in a day, but it didn't fall overnight. Some of its remains are still standing. This exhibition celebrates the mineral traces that will remain long after our passage on Earth, and as the philosopher Ibn Khaldun said as long ago as the 14th century: ‘When empires allow themselves to grow old, and the day falls, the shadow of the mountains move forward’.