Nothing is true, everything is alive.

Symbiotic art, forms and languages of life

To conclude its first season of research and creation residencies placed under the sign of the living, the Fondation LAccolade - Institut de France brought together the three artists of the first season, Chloé Jeanne, Charlotte Gautier Van Tour, Caroline Le Méhauté, with the participation of artists Cristopher Cichocki and Luz Moreno.

The very title of the exhibition "Rien n'est vrai, tout est vivant" (Nothing is true, everything is alive) and of the first season of residencies at the Fondation LAccolade is by Édouard Glissant. The first occurrence of this aphorism in his work appears as an excipit of the story La Terre Magnétique, les errances de Rapa Nui, l'île de Pâques. The expression is then spoken by one of the protagonists of the book, Ammy, custodian of the imaginary of the people of Rapa Nui. She provides a possible access to the unresolved enigma of the giant deities of Easter Island.

In his last writings and interventions, Édouard Glissant will not cease to take up the aphorism to amplify it, to develop it, as the will to transmit poetically what was always in the heart of his work, the invitation to think and live the world by the trembling and not the fixity, by the diverse and not the One, by the relation and not the enclosure. To the True, fixed and absolute, Édouard Glissant opposes the Living, unexpected and trembling.

At the end of this first season of residencies, we wanted this exhibition less as the conclusion of the artists' research and creations, but more as an introduction to what cannot fail to emerge when a sensitive dialogue is established with the living. The exhibition is choral in the sense that the materials from which the artists create have their share of autonomy. From Charlotte Gautier Van Tour's micro-organisms to Caroline Méhauté's peat, Chloé Jeanne's mycelium, Luz Moreno's yeast, and Cristopher Cichocki's barnacles, they all tell us the intertwined portrait of a living being that can only be understood, heard, in the infinite composition and recomposition of its diversity.

The portraits of earth, mycelium and micro-organisms are held up to us like mirrors in which the spirals of a living being are reflected by and through us, finally understood in a peaceful relationship and in a long time. Symbiosis is at the very origin of life. To grasp the meaning of such an affirmation, we must learn the innumerable languages of the living, whether they are embodied in the smells, the roughness, the folds, the traces, the strata, that surround us. Each of the works in the exhibition is an invitation to penetrate the visible and invisible architectures of the living, from the closest to the most distant.

Christopher Yggdre - Paris, October 2021

From October 16 to 31, 2021, Espace Cœur Marais, 3 rue Portefoin, 75003 Paris.