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[Artistic reasearch]
(Research on techniques of the invisible in industrial societies. Database / fictions / installation)
We could say that in our industrial societies, science acts as a monopole of our relations to the invisible. Physics, chemistry, biology and certainly psychology, create “legal” representations of what we do not perceive directly by the senses. But affirming this is denying the profusion of other technics of the invisible, where the flow never tarnishes, but constantly changes in the forms they take. Even though the traditions are again and always imported from somewhere else (India, Siberia, Central Africa…) The Æthers seeks to retrace other linages by plunging into the history of our industrial societies. A context in which these practices are shaped by being in friction with the sciences and technics that have produced a world saturated by waves.
Because between the middle of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the exchanges were numerous between the emerging experimental sciences and the practices we hold today as non scientific. Their wouldn’t have been any telephone, telegraph or radio if their hadn’t been communications of spirits and mediums. At each side of the border that we trace as science or non science, the researchers of the invisible were animated by the same ambition: revealing a world imperceptible to humans. And getting there meant sharing concepts, instruments, institutions, relations, dinners… For certain, these new territories became spaces of experimentations and freedom out of a system of exclusion of class or gender. We find in this abundant ensemble many women, another relationship to the body, a more qualitative than quantitative approach, collectives, multiple worlds that activate themselves…
Between other techniques, The Æthers looks at the occult chemistry investigations experimented by two Theosophists at the end of the 19th century; Kirilian photography imagined by a couple of Russian inventors in the 1930’s; the Kozyrev mirrors made by Siberian doctors in the 1990’s; shifting developed by young teenagers at the first confinement and largely spread on social media. These specific technics resonante with a broader group of practices of the invisible documented in the archives of The Æthers: spiritism, instrumental transcommunication, photography of thoughts, vision at a distance, materialisation of ectoplasm’s, mass radio telepathy, radionics…
2019 - ...
In collaboration with Claire Williams
Exhibition Cosmic foam Traditions No. 1 at Constant vzw from 07.05.22 to 26.06.22