Some of the people who visited the 56th Venice International Exhibition (until tomorrow) during the press days or the early days of the event and saw the uprooted pine trees abandoned around the French Pavilion in the Giardini, probably shrugged thinking the organisers were still finishing setting up the gardens.
The trees looked indeed as if they had recently been delivered and were ready to be replanted somewhere. Yet, careful observers who took the time to stop and look at the trees quickly realised there was something peculiar about the pines.
Indeed, the trees surreptitiously moved between the French, British, Canada and German pavilions, following every now and then unsuspecting visitors. The trees outside the pavilion are actually part of a trio of pines (one stands inside the French pavilion) forming the installation "rêvolutions" by artist Cèleste Boursier-Mougenot.
The pavilion is left open to the elements, conjuring up in this way the follies of the romantic parks of the 18th century, evoking the sense of wonder of Italian Mannerist gardens. But there's more behind these mobile sculptures: the trees, almost protagonists of a fantasy tale, represent machine and nature hybrids, trans-human creatures liberated from their rootedness and therefore gifted with the freedom to go wherever they want, wandering from one nation to the next, migrating across frontiers, admiring the architectures surrounding them and providing shade and shelter to birds and people.
Nature becomes a way to return to the origins and to someone's roots (while hinting also at rootless and displaced human beings), but also turns into an instrument or a music box: the tree in the pavilion emits indeed real-time sound environments via the small differentials recorded in real time.
This new generation of hybrid trees is made mobile by the electricity generated by the conversion of data drawn from their metabolisms.
Technology-wise the trees were devised with the Laboratory for Analysis and Architecture of Systems (LAAS), a Toulouse-based unit within the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS): the plants were first given a motor system to allow movement and then a control architecture to make the movement consistent, keeping in mind the influence of the climate on the plant's metabolism and the safety requirements of the Biennale.
The result of this installation is the physical representation of the main character in Primo Levi's short tale Dysphylaxis, a story in which animate and inanimate worlds converge since the human kind has interbred with other life forms such as animals and plants.
Nature is combined with technology in Cèleste Boursier-Mougenot's installation, but the artist also tackles the rooted/rootless, vegetable/electrical, human/non human dichotomies through his trees, offering visitors a place – the pavilion – where they can take refuge, relax and think about the ecosystem and a hybrid future.
Interestingly enough, while recent fashion and technology collaborations were mainly launched hoping to generate media revenue and sell gadgets and accessories, art seems to be using technology to come up with more imaginative poetical ideas and dreamlike visions that, rather than putting pressure on consumers, may help us thinking not just about ourselves (note the young girl in the video in this post who seems too busy taking a selfie outside the French Pavilion to even realise a tree is moving towards her...), but about the ecosystem surrounding us.
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