Entangling Matter and Meaning at Treignac Projet

Participants: Malin Arnell & Mario Fjell, Jaana Laakkonen, Rachel Schenberg, Sabrina Chou, Caroline Doolin, The Otolith Group and Laura Põld, Moomin books by Tove Jansson, Magdalena Górska, Jason Hendrik Hansma, Inga Lāce, Marina Valle Noronha, Sabrina Soyer, Elina Suoyrjö, Eloise Sweetman

Exhibition title: Entangling Matter and Meaning

Venue: Treignac Projet, Treignac, France

Date: July 1 – September 3, 2017

Photography: Rachel Schenberg, Sabrina Chou, Jaana Laakkonen and Sam Basu, all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Treignac Projet

Entangling Matter and Meaning is a project organised by artists Sam Basu and Jaana Laakkonen and curator Jussi Koitela at Treignac Projet, July 2017. It takes a form of artists’ interferences, a workshop, and the Intra-Structures – Monster of the Seven Lakes exhibition. The project will consider contemporary artistic, curatorial and institutional practices through recent queer and feminist-posthuman critical thinking.

The key undertaking of this multi-disciplinary response is the work of physicist, philosopher of science and feminist, Karen Barad. Within Barad’s thinking, artistic, curatorial and institutional practices are doings; in/voluntary ways of participating in versatile processes that are unable to fit into studio, exhibition space, or institutional infrastructure. Nor can they be contained in the spectator, artist or curator, neither in mind nor body. Doing is co-doing – material-discursive and already very much more flourishing than normalised stories and categories imply. How to do art, curate or institute, and who/what is doing? And what if subject and object are results of specific cuts in intra-actions, making each other, not pre-existing, as the Modern tale proposes.

If the material-discursive entangledness proposed by Barad is taken seriously, and work within the arts is understood as ethico-onto-epistemological processes, what demands does it set for an artist, a curator and institutions? It can be claimed that the commitment to a continuous re-turning of the patterns in practices crucially matters for lives and deaths amongst the diverse social, political, juridical, economic and ecological urgencies. The first step towards a response-able artistic, curatorial and institutional agency is to acknowledge that every meeting matters and makes and leaves a mark in the world and so attends in the World’s Becoming.

Entangling Matter and Meaning entangles different durational, spatial, artistic, discursive and performative forms within Treignac Projet’s post-industrial and rural environment. All of the forms of contributions are planned to intra-act and form multi-disciplinary diffractions.

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The project starts as a interference contributions by artists Malin Arnell & Mario Fjell, Jaana Laakkonen and Rachel Schenberg. The main idea is that the works produced during the interference period will offer a spatial, social, material and discursive input for the workshop itself, but, equally important is that the works take note of the material and historical conditions of Treignac Projet and the Treignac area more broadly. Produced works will link the material and social conditions of the site and the project.

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Intra-Structures – Monster of the Seven Lakes An exhibitionary entanglement with art works by Sabrina Chou, Caroline Doolin, The Otolith Group and Laura Põld, Moomin books by Tove Jansson and various intra-structural narratives.

In one of the seven lakes there is an island, the island of Vassivière where this all began. On this island the Summer Ambiance turned geography → ← intra-structures, inanimate → ← animate, holiday → ← survival, global → ← local, and the Douglas fir wood industry seems to form networks like clusters of amanitas…

The dams of these artificial lakes produce electricity, though for local people the story goes that these lakes exist to keep water to cool down the nuclear plant in the moment of an emergency.

The valley is inhabited by the Moomin family and their kin and companions. It is hard to detect any ontological order here: a comet, creatures, a forest, mountains, entities, a stream, water, a hat, a house, love, threat, sex and genders, seem to be on the stage of a constant coming into being.

The Klovharu island in the Finnish archipelago, marked by solitude and endless companionship, where a writer and an artist used to go every summer – is diffracted trough painterly, material and spatial placements and layerings. The sea joins with tactility, canvas and ceramics – a remembrance of bodies pressed against the rock – haunted by time spent in Yamanashi prefecture, intra-acting within an industrial-rural environment.

Heat spurts out through the crust on yet another islands. Heat that is useful and useless; an expression and a resource; heat that is produced through the love of two tectonic plates, plates that bare the weight of geothermal energy plants, glass factories, geological measures, and human apparatus-industries.

Finally, civilization, infrastructures, highways and cars have entangled themselves into a desert thrilled by constant geological shivering. The earth cracks and throws a seismic psyche to the whole of Southern California.

Still in another valley in Treignac, there is a river and a former yarn factory. In the yard of the factory there is a horn that warns you if the dam bursts. The sound of the horn is not just a warning of potential danger but a reminder of a constant monstrous state where one is not enough and two is too many.

Intra-Structures – Monster of the Seven Lakes is an entanglement of artistic commissions, pre-existing art works and curatorial ideas by Jussi Koitela. It creates a narrative that challenge material, geographical, economic and infrastructural ethico-onto-epistemological orders of modernity and progress. The aim is to trigger knowledge from within merged stages of queer human-nonhuman landscapes, geo-economic-infrastructures and global earthly connections. Release the in/animated intra-active agential monster! .

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Organising, scheduling and curating the Entangling Matter and Meaning workshop is an experiment that attempts to find a format which can hack routes through the richness of the knots in these co-doing practices. The aim is not to represent the theoretical questions but to intra-act with/in the material and cultural context that facilitates the artistic/curatorial/theoretical contributions.

Entangling Matter and Meaning workshop participants are artists, curators and researchers: Malin Arnell & Mario Fjell, Sabrina Chou, Caroline Doolin, Magdalena Górska, Jason Hendrik Hansma, Inga Lāce, Marina Valle Noronha, Laura Põld, Rachel Schenberg, Sabrina Soyer, Elina Suoyrjö and Eloise Sweetman.

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Entangling Matter and Meaning project is supported by Estonian Ministry of Culture, Outset Estonia and Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (EKKM). Jaana Laakkonen’s practice and research is supported by Kone Foundation and The Paulo Foundation. Aalto University, Middlesex University, Art Council of Ireland and State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia have supported the travel of workshop participants Marina Valle Noronha, Elina Suoyrjö, Caroline Doolin and Inga Lāce. Part of Sabrina Chou’s works have been produced at The Castle, International Centre for Art and Landscape, Île de Vassivière, 2016.

Treignac Projet is a rural Art Centre set in a former yarn factory in the Correze region of France. It programs a series of curated international exhibitions as well as artists’ residencies with a bias towards group and collaborative research residencies. As part of its vision to explore and simultaneously make available and accessible cutting edge approaches to contemporary art, Treignac Projet hosts conferences and workshops to accompany its residency and exhibition program. Treignac Projet is supported by Drac Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Conseil Départemental de la Corrèze and Région Nouvelle-Aquitaine.

Laura Põld, Much Later We Go For a Swim, 2017

Sabrina Chou, The Bathers (dramaturgy), 2016

Sabrina Chou, The Holding, 2017;(front), Champignons de la région, 2016

Sabrina Chou, The Holding, 2017

Sabrina Chou, L’île, 2016; (front), Supertitles (Summer Ambiance), 2017

Sabrina Chou, L’île, 2016

Sabrina Chou, L’île, 2016; (left), Caroline Doolin, Fault Bound Bodies, 2017

Sabrina Chou, installation view, 2017, Treignac Projet

Sabrina Chou, Croc, 2016

Sabrina Chou, installation view, 2017, Treignac Projet

Sabrina Chou, The Dam (Piekfijn), 2017

Entangling Matter and Meaning, 2017, installation view, Treignac Projet

Sabrina Chou, En Vacances, 2016; Supertitles (Summer Ambiance), 2017

Sabrina Chou, En Vacances, 2016; Supertitles (Summer Ambiance), 2017; Le Flotteur, 2016

Sabrina Chou, Le Flotteur, 2016

Entangling Matter and Meaning, 2017, installation view, Treignac Projet

Caroline Doolin, Fault Bound Bodies, 2017

Laura Põld, Much Later We Go For a Swim, 2017

Sabrina Chou, Champignons de la région, 2016

Laura Põld, Much Later We Go For a Swim, 2017

Sabrina Chou, Champignons de la région, 2016

Sabrina Chou, Quartet, 2017

Sabrina Chou, Supertitles (Summer Ambiance), 2017. “In the summer, they descended upon the small island, the men preceded by their bellies, the women gently stretching their bare, plump arms. The island, hungry, ate them up, arms and bellies and all, leaving only the occasional bathing suit or slipper. That summer, a catastrophe at the nuclear power plant emptied the lake. The dam gaped open, crying until the water was nearly gone. The island grew fat, sitting in the sandy earth, as new firs were planted and old ones chopped down.”

Kometjakten by Tove Jansson, Söderström & co Förlagsaktiebolag, 1946. Moulineaux le Troll by Tove Jansson, Fernand Nathan, Paris 1968. Moomin House maquette by Tove Jansson, image: Class Löfgren, 1974