COMING BACK DOWN TO EARTH

 

2021-2022 Program

During a pandemic, this ‘coming back down’ might call to mind the ‘back to normality’ that we often hear said in the hope of returning to our old routines. These words, which are supposed to offer comfort, elicit a very different feeling among those who find it absurd to celebrate the end of a crisis by returning to the mechanisms that caused it in the first place.

Though it may sound like ‘getting back to the land’, ‘coming back down to Earth’ resonates in a different – perhaps opposing – way, suggesting a firm grounding in reality and in the urgency to address the current situation, as opposed to looking to an idealized future. It is not about returning to Earth as we envisage or consume it, but returning to our dedicated habitat, its tangible surface full of resources and beauty, as well as all of our unlikely interactions.

Coming back down to Earth is therefore a return to the reality through which we could succeed in abandoning our usual ways of inhabiting and seeing the world. Because this relationship to the world, ‘this outside perspective, which scientific fiction has constructed along with the invention of modern science, appears to be one of the strangest things that we have invented, while leaving us completely helpless in the face of its demise. The fragile and intellectual experience that we are trying to grasp hold of through this other image of a ‘coming back down to Earth’ therefore remains to be entirely constructed: what does it mean to think/act/know/imagine or live on Earth?’

This theme will be addressed across Skol’s 2021-22 programme, which is characterized by a range of representations of a Nature inhabited by the political, in which we perceive, in a subtle or assertive way, the artist’s desire to shift their position, renew their ways of seeing and change their outlook so that they comprehend this Earth that, undermined by our interactions, is also changing, and quickly.

Artists

— Clara Lacasse

— Primordial Dismemberment (démembrement primordial) 

— Chris Boyne

— Pamela Breda

— Francys Chenier

— Charlotte Guirestante Ghomeshi

— Karine Locatelli

— Julie Roch-Cuerrier

— Marie-France Brière

— Romain Gandolphe

 

– Citation by Émilie Hache, introduction to De l’univers clos au monde infini, Éditions Dehors, 2014.

Image : Renaud by Charlotte Guirestante Ghomeshi, photography.