Ondine Bertin at Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain

‘Passerelle is delighted to announce a ground-breaking collaboration with MojennLab, an avant-garde Breton start-up specialising in the creation of ancient and modern legends and optimising the tourist offer. This unique alliance between the art centre and the creative originality of the start-up marks an exciting new venture in the world of contemporary art. MojennLab is recognised for its ability to transcend the limits of the imagination and has joined forces with Passerelle to produce an exhibition that redefines the norms of creativity. The MojennLab combines history and narrative to create unique and unforgettable experiences. MojennLab offers local communities packages of myths tailor-made for each area: dragons, UFOs, brain-eating zombies or reincarnations of Joan of Arc or Charles Martel.

Loïc Le Gall, Director of Passerelle, talks with enthusiasm of this exceptional collaboration: “Passerelle has always been devoted to celebrating art in all its forms. By joining with MojennLab, we have the opportunity to push back the limits of our commitment to artistic innovation and entrepreneurship and present our audience with an incredible artistic experience.” The co-founder of MojennLab, Guildern Le Guenec’h, is delighted with this visibility: “To have the chance to show what we are capable of in an art centre such as La Passerelle demonstrates the original and international ambition of MojennLab. We are here to design the tourism of tomorrow and I am sure that art can help us in some way.”’

Ondine Bertin (1995) is a graduate of the European Academy of Art in Brittany (Brest site) and in 2023-2024 she was awarded a place on the Artist in Residence Workshops programme. She invites us to take part in a unique adventure at Passerelle by inventing a business of the imagination specialising in the creation of legends for regions that do not have their own. Hers is a caustic world, gently mocking the world of business and its codes, from the sometimes absurd teambuilding, to the new Franglais thrown up by the new professions, and examines the notion of the purpose of work, well-being and achievement.

Her MojennLab business, a portemanteau word combining Mojenn, Breton for legend, and Lab for laboratory, is sufficiently unusual and plausible to be almost credible in its role as a tourism consultancy. Whereas the words are perfectly believable, the images betray a use of artificial intelligence with room for improvement – which the artist demands – that often causes glitches (unexpected minor digital errors) with horrible results such as deformed faces.

Imagining a scenario that could be real, she questions the place of truth and information in today’s world where fake news has become almost indistinguishable from real news. How is history written? How is it sometimes falsified? These are serious questions which Ondine Bertin develops in her exhibition under the cover of her humour that is sometimes dark and sometimes simple and basic.