Season 1 in Paris - Nothing is True, Everything is Alive

The first season of the artistic and research residencies at the Fondation LAccolade are devoted to the world of the living. The title of the season hijacks Edouard Glissant’s famous aphorism, “Nothing is True, Everything is Alive.” He expounded on this statement during a speech given at the Maison de l’Amérique Latine in Paris in 2010, by pitting the dynamics of the True as an absolute against the Living as an expression that knows no discontinuity. He also stated, during an interview, that, “the most basic level of this assertion is that we must move from ideology to pulsation, from systematic notion to intuition. Pulsation and intuition are the living. Ideology is the true, not in the sense of a particular truth, but of the absolute (and sectarian) Truth that has often been at the origin of the quest for knowledge (and power), particularly in the West. In “Nothing is True, Everything is Living”, the living represents the unexpected, the unforeseen, often the irrational – but also the ultra-rational, without any fixity…”

To capture this notion of the living, one must undoubtedly have a particular disposition, a renewed sensibility, if only to understand its breadth, its infinite ramifications, its fragility. The infinitely concrete experience of climate change, or the disappearance of entire swathes of living beings (here, we are referring to animals, plants, and the last wilderness) forces us to move, to think laterally, to decentralize ourselves. 

For this first season of residencies, Foundation LAccolade welcomes Charlotte Gautier Von Tour, Caroline le Méhauté, and Chloé Jeanne, three artists who each, in the very development of their pieces and in the act of creation, mobilize the living, undertake a relationship with it that resembles a dialogue. Less about creation using a living material, it is more about seeing the living as the very fabric of art, with its own share of unpredictability and autonomy. 

Biology classifies the types of interactions between living things according to four main principles: parasitism, predation, commensalism, and mutualism. While the first two are familiar to us, the last two are less so; and yet, we stand to gain, as the living among the living, from exploring and understanding commensalism, an interaction beneficial to its actors, and seeing mutualism as an art of relationship in which metamorphosis is nothing to fear. The living world is a metamorphic continuity, and we know from research carried out by microbiologist Lynn Margulis, that the habitability of Earth would not have been possible without the symbiotic action of the innumerable populations of microorganisms. 

While in the past, artists have used the living, such as bacteria and fungi, to create their pieces, over fifty years ago, their approaches were essentially linked to the perishable and to decomposition. The relationship with the living in art today seems more oriented towards metamorphosis, symbiosis, reparation and care.