We Don’t Record Flowers, Said the Geographer.

View of the exhibition "We Don’t Record Flowers, Said the Geographer." Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2010-2011. Image: Ouidade Soussi-Chiadmi

Lara Almarcegui, Louidgi Beltrame, Ursula Biemann, Julien Blanpied, Wang Bing, Tacita Dean, Ellie Ga, Michael Höpfner, Ruth Kaaserer, Yves Mettler, Trevor Paglen, Carson Salter, le Silo, Triple Canopy et José León Cerrillo

An exhi­bi­tion by: bo-ring (Virginie Bobin and Julia Kläring)

A both infinite and self-enclosed ter­ri­tory (double illu­sion), “the desert” crys­tal­lizes a broad net­work of dis­ci­plines and ref­er­ences, from geog­raphy to lit­er­a­ture, phi­los­ophy to biology, car­tog­raphy to ecology. Desert is white­ness “without qual­i­ties” – or so it is fan­ta­sized – and is best cap­tured with maps or planar rep­re­sen­ta­tions. It is thus an ideal space for pro­jec­tion, inscrip­tion, and the for­ward plan­ning of polit­ical fan­tasies, archi­tec­tural utopias, sci­en­tific expe­di­tions, and some of fic­tion’s founding nar­ra­tives. It is the image of a place that is out of time and out of the world, a hetero­topia often rep­re­sented with con­no­ta­tions of roman­ti­cism. It is also a land­scape, a (film) devel­oper, a the­ater, a lab­o­ra­tory, crossing migra­tory tra­jec­to­ries, socio-polit­ical exper­i­ments and attempts for national hege­monies: before all, a place that bodies and his­to­ries pass through and con­sti­tute.

We Don’t Record Flowers, Said the Geographer takes roots in the appro­pri­a­tion – under var­ious forms and for var­ious rea­sons – of the desert an its images in modern and post­modern polit­ical and cul­tural his­tory. Beyond the cur­rent fas­ci­na­tion for entropy and the poetics of ruins, the exhi­bi­tion con­siders both “nat­ural” desert spaces and deserted urban ones in dialec­tics of occu­pa­tion/de-occu­pa­tion and appro­pri­a­tion/expro­pri­a­tion. Such ter­ri­to­ries call for design – according to Hal Foster’s under­standing – and many artists appro­pri­ated these mul­tiple inter­woven rela­tion­ships in order to examine, doc­u­ment and report on them and/or to pro­duce new pro­jec­tions and new nar­ra­tives. We Don’t Record Flowers (…) is inspired by a con­cep­tion of geog­raphy that takes into account the rela­tion­ship between sub­ject and place: a con­cep­tion that is not fixed but trans­formable and is reg­u­larly rede­fined and restruc­tured, quite dif­ferent from the author­i­tarian and eth­no­cen­tric con­cep­tion evoked by the title – a quote from Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince. The doc­u­men­tary and ethno­graphic aes­thetic of most of the pre­sented pieces actu­ally reveals a more vast and subtle net­work of con­no­ta­tions, lapses and nar­ra­tions, proposing a psy­cho­geo­graphic lec­ture on the desert.

A pro­gram of nar­ra­tives (films, con­fer­ences, per­for­mances) will accom­pany the exhi­bi­tion.

www.bo-ring.net

Download the press release (in French)

View of the exhibition "We Don’t Record Flowers, Said the Geographer." with Michaël Höpfner, Outpost of progress, 2010. Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2010-2011. Image: Ouidade Soussi-Chiadmi.

The exhi­bi­tion is sup­ported by :