Vivos Voco, I Summon the Living

Group exhibition initiated by a sculptor, addressed to a sound and visual artist, a writer, and a visual artist.

In a garden, bodies and minds can consider themselves as living forms among a multitude of other moving, organised and resilient forms, at once foreign to oneself and deeply rooted in the same existence. The garden appears successively flamboyant, parched, dead, budding. It is a quest, a resolutely human will not to produce, but to create. It is a creation with the living, which cannot untie itself from the rules it imposes. And yet they have names, bays, beginnings and ends, they belong to someone. Each garden is associated with the one who shapes it, yet it is more bound to all the others than to the hand that prunes it. Hedges are encounters, they only separate humans; the living pays no attention to them and passes between, beneath, above. Here a colloquium of gardens unfolds, meeting one another, and visitors are invited to observe the formal interactions these emergences weave. The immanence of this form of plant poetry imposes itself as a way of creating by and for itself.

Vivos voco — I summon the living belongs to a cycle of exhibitions guided by the idea of the garden. For this third proposition, Margot Anquez Bariseau invites artists Emilia Labbé, Ulysse Feuvrier and Minh Boutin, whose practices move through poetic, living, biological imaginaries. Vivos voco takes its name from Ulysse Feuvrier's work, which interlaces bodies and trees through the act of writing. Caught on paths where flesh and spirit shift from colours to textures, perceiving the memory of lost beings and tangible reality layered upon one another, Ulysse suspends the logical course of time and returns to the earth. His perception of existence flows in a continuous movement, from the psyche to what lies outside the self, and conversely from territory to intimacy.

This reciprocity, born of the desire for fusion between body and plant world, also runs through Minh Boutin's work as a soothing energetic vibration. This two-beat, mirrored movement rhythms the sounds and images she produces through a principle of slowness and fluidity. Minh embodies Ginkgökoko, a dreamlike musical garden weaving voice, piano and electronics, half-pop, half-experimental. She forges a universe in which the transformation of materials, sonic or visual, distils in us the sensory experience of the forest and the promise of inner appeasement.

Yet this iteration of the garden calls for disorder, without chronology, blurring biological markers. By seizing everyday objects from childhood, transferring the sovereignty of the human habitat to that of the bee, Emilia offers a narrative that lies halfway between reality and fiction, grasping the unsettling effects of human civilisation. These reliefs of a history that lives alongside ours are at once the original and the copy of these symbioses between bees and humans, rethinking the hierarchy of living beings in a world where biological kingdoms are subtly called into question. Emilia's installations are a window between our here and her elsewhere.

After chaos, life is born in an anarchy of forms and origins. Skin, bark or rocky surface, the creatures Margot scatters across the space inhabit this mutant garden. Clay and wood fuse to create beings where the borders between human and non-human dissolve. Through the hybridisation of flesh and architecture, she conceives chimeras that redraw the limits between inert and living, sacred and profane. Here, the hybridity of bodies bears witness to a will to establish continuity between living and non-living elements, inviting us to think in terms of relation and becoming.