Animal oriented human | For science

A deer lying on a platform, finally, a deer skin attached to the legs with “pipes” to make a huge, working stick: blowing into the animal’s mouth, the instrument sounds with the deep sounds of the plate. in a kind of confrontation with the resurrection of the deer and the horror of the hunt. Welcome to the world of object-oriented art Cornebra He is opening a retrospective dedicated to him at the Chamarande estate in Essonne.

This artist duo – Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin – has been drawing inspiration from the sciences (anthropology, ethology, biology, etc.) since 1991 to question and analyze the relationship between man and nature, man and other animal forms. .

The resulting works of art are often unpredictable and plunge the viewer into an abyss of confusion. Mission accomplished, then, since it’s about making people think about the complexities of interspecies without forgetting to smile, artists work so hard to have fun creating, as they say, “obstructing.” of otherness with the animal that our culture continues to construct. »

So, I saw myself, I was a centaurmade of sculpted deer antlers, it shows what a real centaur would look like, a real cross between a horse and a man.

It would not be a bust-covered horse bodyHomo sapiens who would have three pairs of limbs, but rather a man whose only lower limbs were nails, like the satyrs of Greek mythology. The idea of ​​hybridization with this horse is also in his heart Let the horse live in me, a work in two stages. First up are the prosthetic horse legs that Marion Laval-Jeantet sits on to walk alongside a real stallion.

This is a performance related to bio-art, this artistic movement that uses the latest biotechnological achievements: after long discussions with scientists, the transfer of horse blood into the artist’s body, first the healing possibilities of animal blood, and then the blood elements on the horse should be discarded because they are too dangerous.

It is also the basis of biotechnology Microbiotic landscapesthey take the populations of microorganisms inhabiting the intestinal system of all living things as the basic material.

The duo became interested in it back in 2010, and in 2015 sent Rob Knight from the University of California, San Diego (and co-founder of the Microbiome Earth project, offering to analyze the microbial communities of 200,000 biological samples taken from around the world). world), faecal samples to obtain maps of existing species.

The first results revealed a kind of globalization of microbes (Covid-19 is another example), usually found in the four corners of the planet, reflecting the different journeys of the two artists, especially in Africa. can be seen in the work Tracked, is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts in Dole, Jura, as part of the “Care” exhibition. To go beyond the numerical models and statistics that characterize the microbiota today, they used microphotographic methods developed by INRAe and AgroparisTech biologist Chantal Bridonneau of the Micalis Institute to visualize their internal fauna. . In doing so, they detected pathogenic species such as amoeba that no conventional biological test could detect! According to them, this is proof that the disappearance of analog in favor of digital has led to the loss of a subtle understanding of our inner world.

From their photos, they took four microbiotic landscapes presented at the Chamarande estate, dioramas corresponding to 1 square centimeter of the intestinal wall, in which pathogenic microorganisms and harmless microbes are presented. The wax of some landscape elements even captures actual bacteria as a memory of the artists’ microbiota. The stage also includes fluorescence microscopes used in molecular biology.

Art Orienté Objet’s interest in the microbiota grew with performance Let the first forest live in me, that is, the transfer of the microbiota of the Baka chick living in the equatorial forests into the body of Marion Laval-Jeantet. The discovery of the myriad roles of the microbiota on the health and behavior of the host, like the discovery of natural selection by Darwin or heliocentrism by Copernicus and Galileo, overturned people’s conceptions of themselves and their lives. A place in the universe and within living things. The exhibition goes in the same direction as questioning the conditions of our existence. You can do it while having fun with these two artists.