Dear Shaded Viewers,
The Lafayette Anticipations Foundation invited Jean-Marie Appriou and Marguerite Humeau to imagine an original project that extends from the façade and the interior courtyard to all the exhibition spaces. Inspired by the building’s unique architecture, the two artists have created an odyssey in the form of a new kind of garden.
Through several scenes evoking catastrophe, renewal, truce, cosmic times or elsewhere, the scenario of the exhibition Surface Horizon, imagined by Marguerite Humeau, takes the form of a walk in which the visitor meets these evocative landscapes. Composed of plants, greenhouses, sculptures and the presence of individuals gifted with “extrasensory” perceptions, this experience invites us to think about future worlds and to heal the present world.
The exhibition is inspired by the ground and all the visible and invisible interactions that run through it, as well as the potentials it holds. Drawing on the history of our relationship with the earth, the exhibition explores the contamination, depletion and burning of the earth caused by part of the human race. Against a territorial and exclusive vision, the artists perceive the earth as a place of exchange and interdependence. Surface Horizon is a fable, an opera, a science fiction composed of the two artists’ mixed works.
Based on Marguerite Humeau’s months-long study of the power of “weeds”, which have become the main characters of this project, the exhibition celebrates marginalised species, feelings and stories. Marguerite Humeau deploys sculptures and “plant performances” inspired by the theory of signatures, an immemorial research on medicinal plants that sees in their silhouettes the shape of the parts of the human body that they can heal. Jean-Marie Appriou’s scenes, from the myth of the human “gatherer-sower-gladiator” to the community of the Japanese Ama, fisherwomen in apnea, turn human and non-human relationships into fantastic and dreamlike visions conducive to metamorphosis.
The exhibition is a tribute to the “disappeared” of our physical and mental landscapes, those absent from our minds and our imaginations. How, at a time when the role of our humanity is to be reinvented, can we draw inspiration from these presences and praise the diversity of voices that make up our worlds? How, like the soil, can we become the humus of future life, the guarantee of the fertility of life, rather than its disappearance?
Surface Horizon proposes a hybridization between beings and sketches out a mythology of the present times, stories nourished by sensibilities, attentions, and renewed dignities, reflecting on another world, perhaps still sleeping under our feet.Commissaire : Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel
