Installation: 4K film with sound, 24-inch recycled LCD screen, LED plates, transparent prints, paper, tracing paper, adhesive, cables, laptop, bluetooth speaker, tables, 500 x 70 x 80 cm, 2022
The installation L’insu is based on the film The Unknown. As an extension of the film, it explores the ideologies conveyed by the market economy on science and research, particularly through image banks.
A generative programme endlessly loops stock videos evoking science: laboratories, researchers, etc. Their smooth, interchangeable, technicist and falsely inclusive aesthetic could just as easily apply to companies or start-ups. These images, stripped of reality and any conflict, convey an ideology of progress, efficiency and performance. The film superimposes sentences that question these videos. What is the impact of these images? How do they contribute to a collective imagination of science and society’s expectations?
The installation is spread out on a very long table, borrowing from the codes of a workspace or research area blown apart by disorder and comprising a laptop, a dismantled screen panel and 75 prints on transparencies of images and phrases from the film. It forms a constantly renewed flow, exploding onto the table and around it in the exhibition space.
Created in residence at Turbulence, an art space at Aix-Marseille University (Saint-Charles site), at the invitation of artist and researcher Damien Beyrouthy, as part of the research project Épistémologies pour médium (Epistemologies for Medium).
The video The Unknown was created in 2022 for the exhibition Supplementary Elements at the University of Strasbourg, curated by Emeline Dufrennoy. Borrowing from the codes of advertising, the installation of the work in Strasbourg, on a giant LED screen in a shop window, opposite the tramway and at the foot of the Doctoral School, reinforces the public dimension of this questioning.