Les lumières de Montaigne, 2023 Sentence in blue leds
Installation in the Vitrine des Essais, Bordeaux When Montaigne published the first edition of the Essais in 1580, his thought and insight taught us the need to distance ourselves from things. The sentence, "L'usage nous dérobe levrai visage des choses." (Essais, I, 23, p. 115) means that customs and habits obscure real life as we ought to live it. As early as the middle of the 16th century, Montaigne was advocating the arts and literature, sport and, above all, travel, as a means of gaining a fresh perspective on our daily lives. The propagation of his phrase in the rue sainte Catherine in Bordeaux sheds light on our thoughts.
Based on Ernst Haeckel, The Artistic Forms of Nature, 2022 Prints on canvas, dimensions variable
Exhibition LE RÊVE DE L'OURS with artist Anne-Marie Durou, Vitrine des essais, Bordeaux
In November 1859, Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was published in Great Britain. In it, the author establishes that plants as well as animals, including man, derive from a small number of primitive forms, if not from a single one: by blurring the delimitation of species between man and animal, and suggesting that life arises from the same material, a new era in the history of species boundaries is inaugurated.
In 1921, Germany published Environment and the Inner World of Animals, in which Jacob van Uexkull also criticizes the classical science that sees our space as a single world. On the contrary, the author assumes an infinite variety of perfectly interconnected perceptual modes. His work on sea urchins, amoebas, jellyfish, sea anemones, bees, dragonflies and ticks shows that the relationships between a given animal and its environment are not the same as ours, but are linked in the same life movement... It is on the basis of these two theories, which shatter any idea of hierarchy and domination of species by man, that artists Anne Marie Durou and Corinne Szabo propose a scenography that reflects the permeability of our existence with the animal and plant world, and the mobility of our perceptions. Here, the artist dramatizes the archives of Darwin's disciple, Ernst Haeckel, who, in his book The Artistic Forms of Nature (1899), shows that all living beings originate from the same prehistoric cell, the "monere".
The "vitrines" are in situ projects for the Vitrine des essais, an exhibition space created in 2015 in Bordeaux based on a partnership between preparatory class students and artists in a joint work of exhibition mounting, writing and communication.