Continuum of memory
Inviting Léo Fourdrinier to exhibit at the Site archéologique Lattara – Musée Henri Prades provides him with the ideal playground for his work. At the heart of his work is a dialogue between past, present and future, designed to shed light on our perception of contemporary and future realities. In a constant back-and-forth between reality, science and fiction, his projects never cease to nourish and stimulate our imaginations.
Poetry, philosophy, theatre and literature are major influences for the artist. The title of the exhibition, ‘Historians of the Future’, takes its inspiration from a passage in ‘My Poor Imagination Room’, a collection of writings by Tadeusz Kantor, one of the greatest theatre theorists of the 20th century. In the exhibition, we also find this taste for directing acquired during his training at the Conservatoire des Arts Dramatiques in Nîmes. He also forged his formal and fragmentary repertoire in art school, and continues to nourish it today through his passion for art history, science and archaeology.
His sculptures and installations are defined by his preferred materials: neon lights, manufactured objects and fragments that he has salvaged, collected and found, as well as ceramics, plaster casts and vehicles that he assembles. He works by deconstructing, adding, moving and multiplying assemblages, leading to an unexpected evolution of forms.
The exhibition is a fiction in which augmented beings, a hybrid of human and artificial intelligence, become the only way for humanity to survive in the face of unbridled development and depleting resources. Memory and knowledge have become indispensable, replacing water, which has almost completely disappeared from the face of the earth. History has become a vital resource for the biological functioning of the human organism, which, endowed with new capacities, recycles and transforms information into vital and mental energy. Léo Fourdrinier plunges us into a scenario worthy of a futuristic film that sets the scene for transhumanism, a movement that believes that advances in biology and artificial intelligence will make it possible to transform or surpass man to create a post-human, or transhuman, with capacities superior to those of current beings.
On the forecourt of the museum, visitors will discover Venus, a sculpture in reference to the goddess of love and beauty. A hijacked motorbike, its fairing carved from Carrara marble and rearing forward, replicates the figure of the sun, well known to motorcyclists. It is a mode of transport that symbolises technology, the movement of bodies and speed. It’s also the romantic personification of a romantic ride. Fifteen historians of the future punctuate the route, busy recovering the memory of artefacts and objects, and absorbing the stories and knowledge transmitted and preserved by the museum.
On the ramps leading up to the collections, a historian of the future greets visitors, seated high up, seemingly keeping watch. A second historian, on the top floor, observes and coordinates the other historians. Each historian is camouflaged in biker clothes, adorned with ceramic objects, casts and helmets enhanced by stellar neon lights that reflect the energy they have ingested. These Cyborgs, half-human, half-robot, with their cyberpunk aesthetic, could be straight out of the film ‘Mad Max’ or the animated film ‘Ghost in the Shell’.
A neon sign entitled ‘The limits of the Earth at the end of Paradise’ catches our eye. This statement reigns over the museum’s historians and display cases, like an omen. A reference to the god Janus, placed at the top of the scaffolding, it connects terrestrial and cosmic space and gives the works a novel narrative, echoing the mythological tales of the museum. The Roman god of doors and choices, he is represented with two opposing faces: one turned towards the past, the other towards the future. The exhibition invites us to look at the museum’s collections through a game of shifting our bodies and our gaze on the objects on display, and to enter into an unspoken and unexpected conversation with the historians of the future.
Léo Fourdrinier has produced an original, embodied project that reveals all the attention he has devoted to observing, excavating, questioning and analysing the history of Lattara and its objects. Informed by his rich exchanges with Diane Dusseaux, Director and Curator, as well as the museum team, he reveals the importance of passing on knowledge and memory. With a long history of sculpture running through it, it pushes back the boundaries and disrupts our relationship with reality by plunging us into its fiction, turning us into historians of the present.
–Rahmouna Boutayeb
