caméra silex patates germées

Group exhibition by the student group No Name at Haute École des arts du Rhin (HEAR), Strasbourg (F).

Opening: Friday 19.4.2019 from 7 pm to 9 pm

PROGRAMME:

Ludovic Hadjeras : Le loup ne peut guetter la lune qu'en sortant de la forêtWerewolves are known to go faster when the moon is full. This is also the case on the evening of the opening.

Juliette Kerviche : s’attrouper The story of the inhabitants of the bowls around the work U by Juliette KervicheLanguage: French

Jules Maillot : je suis devenue allergique à ma propre langue"Turn the light to a minimum and eliminate distractions, add some music to create a background noise, Cubensis Hawaiian gives you a color-fetish experience (...)"

No Name, a student group at Haute École des Arts du Rhin (HEAR), in Strasbourg, is participating in the FAIRE-MONDES research unit. As the students explore issues of globalization and probe the “ecology of narratives,” they move back and forth between the political and the poetic. 

 At the heart of their investigations in the 2018-19 year are questions related to evolution in the broad sense. How do you recount the dialectic of continuity and change? What do narratives of evolution convey? How do you sequence the different forms of evolution? Like an alchemical formula or a clapping game, camera silex patates germées (camera flint sprouted spuds) presents a series of interchangable elements, with no hierarchy. Which came first: the camera, the flint or the potato?  When the potato, newly arrived on European shores, was presented to the Pope, a diplomatic issue arose: the Quechua word for the root vegetable is papa. Which is also what popes are called. To avoid confusion, the tuber was renamed patata. At the same time, the camera obscura was being used as both a viewing machine and a device for projecting images.

Somewhere, on ocean floors, siliceous inclusions were occuring. Flints, freed by erosion, fragmented by freezing, tumbled by currents, washed up on the beach amid a multitude of rounded pebbles. Their rubbing caused sparks.  

To evolve is not to progress, to improve. It means to change, continuously, to experience change, to hybridize.   Without flints, would it have been possible to build screens? Evolutions play out on many different scales: in interstices, along imaginations, in the subtitles of grand histories, deep in interactions. The strata of our narratives overlap and sometimes tangle together. Will potatoes sprout on the far side of the Moon?

Graphic design: Julie Bassinot, Morgat Bry, Chani Pouzet, Marie Serrié of the graphic communication depatment at HEAR