Tactical Specters — La Ferme du Buisson, Noisiel
Inspired by philosopher Vinciane Despret and poet Sean Bonney, as well as influenced by the thought of Derrida, the Tactical Specters exhibition at La Ferme du Buisson plays with the incarnations of memory to multiply the breaths of recollection that keep thought in dynamic spaces.
Tactical Specters — Exposition collective @ La Ferme du Buisson, Centre d’art contemporain from March 16 to July 13. Learn more A rich theoretical foundation allows the invited artists to fully express their sensitivity and to propose works that resemble experimental processes, where form, though assertive, creates a zone of ambiguity conducive to the invention of a strategy for welcoming and cohabiting with the alterities that inhabit them. By making esotericism a vector of shared experience, this exhibition rethinks the modalities of knowledge while avoiding the pitfall of mysticism, constituting one of the most compelling proposals of contemporary art as it increasingly explores the boundaries of the rational. Without liquidating its heritage or attempting to rehabilitate a pop obscurantism, it explores the margins of consciousness to reveal the unthought — or even the unthinkable — of the cognitive field, playing with flashes of insight and historical remanences that, even if they cannot be explained, influence our lives and bend reason to better highlight its complexity.
From the outset, Publik Universal Frxnd’s birds stand on the edges of the exhibition space, forming two rows of gazes and songs into which the spectator is invited to step. Omnipresent in our living spaces, birds carry with them legends, knowledge, and symbols that nourish our system of thought. The crow, chosen here, is no exception and symbolizes, in certain folklores, the link between different dimensions. A symbolic passage, then, to open this journey, which intersects with Assoukrou Aké’s paintings, whose circular forms, akin to the faces he draws, lead us toward a humanization of the strange.
Mutant or masked humanity, the dissolution of the face hints at a cohabitation between all forms of life, erasing the signs of time to perhaps contradict its laws. Thus, our own bodies become the stigma of a transmission across generations, whose echoes we read even on our features.
At the center of the space, Chiara Fumai’s installation covers a museum plan with a single continuous handwritten text. Structured around a performance in which the artist played a museum guide before entering a trance, the work disrupts the established order to make an external element emerge within the plan (both physical and metaphorical), saturating it and offering a possible escape. The presence of a barrier, typical of spaces of power and representation, further complicates its reading: does it protect us from this unexpected emergence, or does it prevent us, on the contrary, from disrupting its course? Faced with this inhabited reality, the spectator remains unsettled, hesitating between defense and fascination.
Words hold together along a line that underscores the idea of constant activity, like a thread linking the works of the exhibition. For even when flat, the electroencephalogram needle still functions, waiting—whether in hope or fear—for a jolt that will make it dance. In waiting, the violence of the past continues to haunt our present, whether through Chiara Fumai’s invocation of the Red Brigades in her trance or the figures of Ulrike Meinhof and Rosa Luxemburg in Nils Alix-Tabeling’s stunning chair-sculptures, which seem to expand into the space through strange organic structures. Violence is also evident in the marginalization and denial of humanity, particularly in Coco Fusco’s poignant boat journey around Hart Island Cemetery, dedicated to society’s forgotten. In this work, New York Bay becomes an earthly avatar of the Styx, silently carrying its sum of forgotten specters—beings who, even in death, were never truly seen.
Belinda Kazeem-Kaminski attempts to counter this erasure by subverting the university lecture format, which, devoid of an audience, transforms into an open dialogue between the speaker and the silent figures in photographs taken by a Belgian ethnographer. She unpacks these images, trying to reveal the humanity masked by the constant presence of this omnipotent man. A masterful work, both in form and substance, it embraces the modes of our time, even foreshadowing today’s modes of communication: a solitude before a reparative camera, where the image—long an instrument of dispossession—gives way to minimalist forms that obscure individuals in order to question the reality of their existence, necessarily in flux.
Memories, presences, and recollections are, now more than ever, moving muscles whose shape, though perceptible in negative, remains a force of absolute affirmation.
Decomposition and decay emerge in the work of Jota Mombaca, who submerges fabric scraps in rivers for months, and in the work of Anouk Maugein & Lorraine de Sagazan, who create a display designed to be altered by mold. A becoming-specter that offers a tangible vision of the dynamics of this concept, which, in this exhibition, becomes an eminently sensitive datum, whose experience—imbued with an openness to the dead—accompanies the living.
When it is not directly tied to a more intimate question—such as in Vir Andres Hera’s installation, where he involves his own mother in a work that summons her, or in Hamedine Kane’s project, which reclaims childhood codes to weave filial connections with departed figures, including writers James Baldwin, Chester Himes, and Richard Wright—this dynamic extends to collective dimensions.
Neither fixed nor ostentatious, the alternative realities deployed by the artists enable a truly free theoretical and imaginative journey, where intimate histories and personal emotions merge with ethereal mists that are anything but harmless. Echoes that the exhibition may well reactivate through our own memories.
