Animal Oriented Human | For information

Reclining on a platform, a deer, finally, a deer skin fitted with “pipes” in place of the legs to make a gigantic and practical bagpipe: by blowing into the animal’s mouth, the instrument reels with deep slap sounds in a kind of deer resurrection and confrontation with the terror of the hunt. Welcome to the world of object-oriented art Cornibra The retrospective dedicated to him opens on the Chamarandí estate in Essonne.

This artist duo – Marion Laval-Jeanette and Benoit Mangin – has been drawing inspiration from science since 1991 (anthropology, ethology, biology, etc.) in order to ask questions and analyze the relationship between man and nature, between human and other animal forms.

The resulting craftsmanship is often unexpected and plunges the viewer into an abyss of bewilderment. Mission accomplished, then, since it is about making people think about the complexity of relationships between species, without forgetting to make people smile, artists work a lot, these are their words, to enjoy creating “to make the barrier from the other with the animal that our culture continues to build.”

And therefore , I saw myself, I was a centaurMade from carved deer antlers, it shows what a true centaur would be like, a true cross between horse and human.

It wouldn’t be a body of horses topped with a bustHomo sapiens Who would have three pairs of limbs, but rather, like the satyrs of Greek mythology, a human being whose lower limbs only had hooves. The idea of ​​crossbreeding with a horse is also from the heart Let the horse live inIt worked in two phases. First of all, there are horse leg prostheses that Marion Laval-Janet sits on to walk alongside a real stallion.

It is a show related to bio-art, this art movement that takes advantage of the latest advances in biotechnology: transfusion of horse blood into the artist’s body after long discussions with scientists, first about the curative capabilities of animal blood and then on equine blood elements to dispose of them because they are too dangerous.

Biotechnology is also the basis Microbiological landscapeswhich takes as its basic material the groups of microorganisms that live in the intestinal tract of all organisms.

The duo became interested in it as early as 2010 and in 2015 sent Rob Knight, of the University of California, San Diego (and co-founder of the Microbiome Earth Project, proposing to analyze microbial communities made up of 200,000 biological samples taken from around the world), stool samples. to obtain maps of the species present.

The first findings reveal about species commonly found in the four corners of the planet, a kind of globalization of microbes (Covid-19 is another example of this) that reflects the different travels, especially in Africa, of the artists. It can be seen in action tracked, visible at the Museum of Fine Arts in Dole, in the Jura, as part of the exhibition “Patronage”. To go beyond the numerical models and statistics that today show microorganisms, they used microimaging methods developed by biologist Chantal Pridono, of the Michaelis Institute (Microbiology of Food in the Service of Health) of INRAe and AgroparisTech, to visualize their indoor animals. . In doing so, they discovered pathogenic species, such as amoebae, that no conventional biological test would detect! According to them, this is evidence that the disappearance of analog in favor of digital leads to a loss of good understanding of our inner worlds.

From their photographs, they captured four microbiological landscapes displayed on the Chamarandi estate, dioramas corresponding to a square centimeter of intestinal wall in which pathogenic microorganisms and harmless microbes are displayed. The wax of some landscape elements even trap real bacteria, such as the memory of artists’ microbes. Staging also includes fluorescence, that is, microscopes used in molecular biology.

Art Orienté Objet’s interest in microbes went further than performance Let the primary forest live in, meaning transplanting the microorganisms of the Paka dwarves, who live in the tropical forests, into the body of Marion Laval-Gant. The discovery of the myriad roles of microbes on the health and behavior of their host, in much the same way that Darwin discovered natural selection or the discovery of heliocentrism by Copernicus and Galileo, disturbed humans’ representation of themselves and their behavior. A place in the universe and within the living. The show goes in the same direction by questioning our conditions of existence, no less. You might as well do it while having fun with these two artists.