The exhibition Chronicles from a near Future consists in an encounter between two installations, Sylvia and Reverse Phylogenesis, which each invite viewers to think about future life: what does the living world look like today, and what forms of biodiversity can we expect to see in the near or distant future?

Phylogenèse Inverse (Reverse Phylogenesis) is based on a recent scientific discovery: a jellyfish capable of reversing its life cycle, allowing it to return to an earlier cellular state. Based on this premise, the artists Golnaz Behrouznia and Dominique Peysson have created the concept of "reverse phylogenesis", imagining a de-evolution process that would lead to varied and extravagant life forms with strange anatomies and enigmatic functions. These organisms are presented here in a small-scale natural history museum setting,reexamining the mysteries of the living world.

Sylvia is an audiovisual installation which immerses the audience in the atmosphere of a far future forest, amidst the mutations of the surrounding fauna and flora. In light of current issues related to the loss of biodiversity, deforestation, and excessive human activity, Stéfane Perraud has created a fiction using sound recordings made in the Risoux forest in France's Haut-Jura region. This story interweaves several speculative theories, whether scientific, fear-mongering, absurd or conspiratorial. The installation takes us way back on the geological timescale, thus putting our all too anthropocentric history into perspective.

The dialogue opened between the works by Stéfane Perraud (Sylvia) and Dominique Peysson & Golnaz Behrouznia (Reverse Phylogenesis) invites you to dive into the future of the living world, raising fundamental questions about the essence of life, and how biological evolution on Earth will unfold.

BIOGRAPHIES

Dominique Peysson

Dominique Peysson lives in Paris. She is a visual artist and a researcher, after being a physician researcher in material science. She holds a PhD in contemporary arts and a PhD in physics. She had a temporary lecturer position in contemporary art at Gustave Eiffel University and at the research program EnsadLab of EnsAD, Paris. She wrote the book The Image-Matter, Dis Voir Ed. To further the fertile encounters between art and sciences, Peysson works in association with exact science laboratories. Her work takes the form of installations, performances and videos. It offers many points of view, a parallax vision that leaves our thoughts wander between powerful haptic feelings and structuring mental construction. She questions the boundary between the natural and the artificial, the inert and the living. Closely combining practice and theory, Peysson regularly exhibits her visual art in France and abroad and is the author of numerous publications. 

Website

Golnaz Behrouznia

Since having studied Fine Arts in Tehran and Digital Creation in Toulouse, Golnaz Behrouznia is known for a mixed-media work focused on the living thing. Her drawings, installations and performances take part in several exhibitions in Iran, France and other countries. In 2017 she created Lumina Fiction #2, an installation offering an immersive environment based on a biological fiction. With her ElectroAnima-Experiment performance, she proposes a parallel version of the emergence of matter and life. In 2021, she created Dissimilarium 0.2, interconnected islets linked to cosmic data, revealing imaginable worlds through generative lights and sounds.

Golnaz Behrouznia’s recent works are based on a desire to examine societal and environmental issues with the very tools that have shaped our past 30 years. With Dissimilarium, Golnaz asks the burning question of how to inhabit the world, when it is perhaps an illusion, or even perhaps already too late.

Website

BIOGRAPHIES

Stéfane Perraud

Stéfane Perraud was born in 1975; he lives and works in Paris. He graduated from Decorative Arts in Paris, and obtained a post-diploma in an interactive research workshop in 2001. His field of research is nourished by science, nuclear physics, geography of the oceans and earthquakes, but also fictional sciences, political romanticism, ethnology, contemporary and archaic literature, cutting-edge techniques, old or lost. This regularly brings him to collaborate with writers, scientists and artisans. His work opens up a –sometimes- fictitious dialogue with the imperceptible, with the perspective of connecting the various activities of the human soul with the intimacy of matter.

His favorite tools and formats are hybridizations that he draws from and deconstructs in new media, advanced science and techniques. He creates installations, sculptures, laser drawings as well as films, with the desire to initiate passages in unprecedented temporal rifts, mixing past, present and future, reality and fiction.

He exhibits his work in France and abroad, in places such as the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the De Roussan gallery in Paris, the WE project and the Maison Particulière in Brussels, the Manoa Art Center in Hawaii, the White Room in Quebec, the Hunting Museum in Paris.

Since 2003, he has collaborated with several artists in the fields of theater, dance and performance (Eli Commins, Trajal Harell, Ali Moini ) for projects shown in venues and festivals such as La Chartreuse de Villeneuve lez Avignons, the MoMa in New York , Impulz Tank in Vienna, Festspiele in Berlin, American Realness in New York.

Website

Gaspard Guilbert

Since he has graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Cergy in 2003 then from BOCAL (project by B. Charmatz) in 2004, Gaspard Guilbert has followed a heterogeneous career. Today he lets his different experiences interact with each other and often sees himself moving from one artistic field to another. Thus, he is both a musician and sound designer for documentary films, for theater and dance (Cie le bel après-minuit, Mark Tompkins, C&C, Laurence Rondoni & Mohamed shafik, David Wampach, Mani Mungai / Cie Wayo, Tatiana Julien ...) as much as he dances himself for different choreographers, among others Olivia Grandville, Boris Charmatz, Jérome Bel, Mohamed Shafik, Annabelle Pulcini, Meg Stuart, Mark Tompkins, C&C, Tatiana Julien, Anne Lopez .. With this diversity, he has also been leading various workshops bringing together music, gestures and words and gives pride of place to improvisation with children as with adults, amateurs or professionals.

Art Press: "Le chef-d’œuvre du moment : “phylogenèse inverse” de g. Behrouznia et d. Peysson" Read it here (French)

PHYLOGENÈSE INVERSE

Artists: Dominique Peysson & Golnaz Behrouznia
Scenography: Rémi Boulnois
Sound Design: Florent Colautti
Scenocraphic Production: Teatros Del Canal Madrid

Support received by Dominique Peysson
Projet de résidences STARTS dans le cadre du programme STARTS de la Commission européenne, basé sur des éléments technologiques du projet LEVITATE, avec le soutien de BIPOLAR Production /
Reflective Interaction/EnsadLab, EnsAD, PSL, Paris, France /
Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, Paris, France /
80/PRIME, CNRS, Laboratoire LIG-INS2I-DR11, Grenoble, France /
FEW, Parcours d'art contemporain, WattWiller, France.

Support received by Golnaz Berouznia
Aide individuel à la création, Sculptures en médias liquides, Préfet de la région Occitanie (DRAC) /
Bourse de création d'œuvres multimédia, CNC (dicréam), création réalisée en résidence à VIDEOFORMES avec le concours de Clermont Auvergne Métropole dans le cadre de sa politique de création, et le soutien de la DRAC Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes /

Residence at CIRPAC, Centre international de recherche sur les arts de la pierre (Saint Béat - FR).

Sylvia

A sound and visual installation by Stéfane Perraud in collaboration with Gaspard Guilbert

With the support of:
Haut-Jura National Park
National Museum of Natural History