The exhibition What does this have to do with everything else? puts the research of SLATO & OTLAS in parallel. The former uses the city of Bombay as it’s starting point, which, at the end of the 19th century, was the scene of a population control system set up by the British colonial power to stem the spread of a plague epidemic. OTLAS is interested in the clay soils consumed for pleasure by people from diaspora communities; a cultural phenomenon sometimes referred to as geophagy.

SLATO, OTLAS and TALOS are among the names from which a group of researchers (Ayoh Kré, Lionel Maes, Deborah Levy & Antoine Wang) operate. What they have in common is that their privileged fields of study are made up of a sediment of practices and discourses from which proliferate a large number of images, objects and documents.

The methodology of the researchers is consistent throughout their work. First of all, they collect documents that condense the thickness and preserve the complexity of the relationships between beings and the things that make them. They then encode these documents in a relational database. Eventually, they subject these documents to more or less extensive transformations and thus manufacture new documents. Finally, they translate these documents from the database to exhibition spaces.

The SLATO and OTLAS exhibition project is supported by la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, section Arts Numériques.