SMITH (cellule Cosmiel x Diplomates x Akira Rabelais) — Désidération : Prologue — Les filles du calvaire Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 26 → November 23, 2019

Photographer, filmmaker and visual artist, SMITH explores the thought and practice of transition, mutation, hybridisation and in-between periods in his artistic and theoretical work. Transition of gender and state, plasticity, atomic and biotechnological metamorphoses, dream work, cosmic strolls and transmutations have punctuated his work and research for the past ten years. Conceived, thought and imagined through his group Cellule Cosmiel, and with Studio DIPLOMATES, his new project Desideration composes the possibility of another history, another fate for the human species, at the border of reality and fiction, art, philosophy and science. This long-term project’s prologue will be presented at Galerie les Filles du Calvaire in autumn 2019.

Smith, Sans titre

Cellule Cosmiel x Diplomates x Akira Rabelais

In 2015, SMITH encountered astrophysicist Jean-Philippe Uzan (Paris Institute of Astrophysics / CNRS). The neologism “Desideration” would arise from their conversations and observations about the world. Forged from the etymology of the word “desire,” this word describes the lack of a celestial object that has disappeared. Joined by writer Lucien Raphmaj, they created Cellule Cosmiel, devoted to the study of the desideration phenomena, and then joined forces with DIPLOMATES (design, architecture, scenography) for the layout of the first phase of this reflection.

Smith, Sans titre

Generale introduction by Lucien Raphmaj

According to today’s most probable scientific hypothesis, the bricks of life necessary to the genesis of humanity were imported by meteorites onto our planet, several million years ago. Modernity has stripped and disappropriated us of this celestial origin, emptied our contemporary mythologies and policies, condemning us to an irrepressible melancholy of the stars which the Desideration project intends to identify, explore, recount and, perhaps, cure.

Desideration is conceived as a hub connecting artistic research, scientific investigation and theoretical speculation. A polymorphous, collaborative and evolving work, it composes new forms and tools to explore our contemporary relationship with the cosmos, by bringing into play the interstices, inter-worlds, critical and multidimensional bridges. Stitching together and darning the world’s canvas — as though stars were like needle holes. Starting again the modern, scientific, romantic, science fictional, botanical, philosophical and shamanic tradition to offer a new divergent reading of it, a bifurcation of possibilities.

Smith, Sans titre

What legend can be proposed to “disaster,” not in the sense of the ruin of everything possible, of the much-promised collapse, but another “disaster,” in the sense of a relationship to the fallen star in us, from which we come and yet we miss? Desideration is not the search for a lost origin (obligatorily erased: we are no longer the dust of stars), it is another relationship to the stars that we must reinvent, with this missing, inconsolable part. Desideration is a state where we link up again in another way with the melancholy of loss.

“The absence of the future has begun,” as the Austrian thinker Günther Anders announced after the use of nuclear fire. It is a question of a metaphysical turning point; which arrives with a crash, it’s urgent — not only climatic, but that of reconsidering the organisation of our metaphysics. From Haraway to Descola, Coccia to Tsing, and not forgetting Stengers, Preciado or Viveros de Castro, a contemporary philosophical discourse searches for the radical reforms of a global and local movement, of a thought so complex that it could extinguish change that makes us mutate. Perhaps it would be time to turn to the stars, with both feet on the ground. Desideration doesn’t talk about the end of the world, but of the endings of the world. It’s a call to combine differently, to link ourselves to another time, to other spaces, to distinguish, in this end, new possibilities. To make nerve, psychological and metaphysical endings for ourselves, going from the sky to the earth.