Call for contributors: Lexicon of drifting

Call for contributors

Calypso36°21 is launching a call for contributions for the Lexicon of drifting, a participatory work produced as part of Out.of.the.blue.map.

The lexicon brings together fragments of narratives [words, expressions, places, images, laws] in order to compose alternative borderscapes, to experiment new ways for borders to be sensed, and made sense of. Being both a place of passage and rupture, the Mediterranean Sea constitutes a liminal territory for some of those who cross it. The work around the lexicon deconstructs this territory, to free ourselves from imposed narratives by exploring their dead angles.

The result of two years of collaboration, this evolving editorial object is composed of contributions from artists, activists, jurists, researchers, architects and people whose work, stories and imaginaries summon, challenge and question these frontier landscapes. The book will be developed, edited and exhibited throughout the [exhibitions+workshops+meetings] programme in Morocco, France and the Netherlands. It will be translated into Arabic, French and English.

The first version of the lexicon will be exhibited at the International Community for Arts Festival in Rotterdam from 24 to 29 March 2020. The deadline for contributions to this version is 20 February.

Publications Calendar

Version 1. Deadline for submissions February 21, 2020. Version 1 will be exhibited at the International Community Arts Festival in Rotterdam, March 24-29, 2020. It will be used as a working tool in a workshop organized during the festival.

Version 2. Deadline for contributions 5 May 2020. Version 2 will be presented in the group exhibition organized at Mahal Art Space, Tangier, from May 28 to June 29, 2020. It will be used as a working tool within the 2 workshops organized in Tangier on the sidelines of the exhibition. This version will be printed in risography in the Kulte Print Studio in Rabat.

Version 3. Deadline for contributions 1 September 2020. Version 3 will be presented in the group exhibition organized in Marseille as part of the programme Les Parallèles du Sud of the Manifesta13 biennial, from September 18 to October 16, 2020.

Contribute to the lexicon: calypso3621 [at] gmail.com

Exhibition: Thierry Fournier, Machinal, Villa Henry, Nice

Personal exhibition
Villa Henry, Nice
Curator Isabelle Pellegrini

From March 25 to April 28, 2018, on appointment
Opening with the artist on March 24 from 14h to 19h
Talk from 4pm to 5pm with Thierry Fournier, Isabelle Pellegrini and Fabienne Grasser-Fulchéri, exhibition curator and art critic, director of the Espace de l’Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux

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Isabelle Pellegrini presents Machinal at the Villa Henry, a solo exhibition by Thierry Fournier that follows his residency for the creation of En Vigie, associated here with three other works.

Today, many images are no longer produced in immediate relation with the human eye, but are produced autonomously by machines and programs. Most of these “assisted visions” are deployed in the military or on the web (Google, Apple, Facebook…), where the detection and anticipation of behaviors is often using similar means for security or commercial purposes. These “intelligent machines” analyze images but can also perform autonomous actions, as in the case of UAVs. In this context, how do we still define our gaze and responsibility? What is our role when we are dealing with systems that not only extend our vision but anticipate it, even replace it? Do we expect machines to look at our place – even to look at us and define us? What are we trying to see (or not see) through them?

Thierry Fournier’s practice frequently posits the fictional hypothesis that things (objects, landscape, network, machines…) would have their own life, by creating situations of displacement or confrontation with them. With the exhibition Machinal, he brings together four works in which our gaze is inseparable from that of these devices. The term “machinal” here refers both to a thought that no longer pays attention to its object (or whose attention is absorbed and captured by devices, as on the Internet) – and the look produced by the machines themselves, autonomously: machinal as one would say animal. The classical frameworks of the gaze as perspective and horizon are then redefined as a territory that is shared, even negotiated, between our own vision and the one that devices deploy on the world and on ourselves.

En Vigie / Nice (2018) is a generative video where a program scrutinizes a landscape of horizon, deploying a cinematographic suspense that invites us to espouse its own logic. The installation Just in Case (2017) ironically imagines that a program would be legitimate to detect if we are indeed human, riveting us to the spectacle of its calculation and waiting for its verdict. With Penser voir (2018), a surveillance camera targeting a beach testifies by a synthetic voice of its inability to detect anything. The series of digital images Non-Lieu (2016) uses photographs of bombardments found on the web and replaces everything that makes it possible to identify the place with a background pattern. Through this set of four pieces, the exhibition proposes a more general reflection on the links and limits between humans and machines, our responsibility and our gaze.

Around the exhibition

A talk will take place on March 24, 4pm to 5pm, with Thierry Fournier, Isabelle Pellegrini and Fabienne Grasser-Fulchéri, exhibition curator and art critic, director of the Espace de l’Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux.

Pandore Édition also publishes a catalogue that includes a text by critic and philosopher Céline Flécheux (L’horizon, Klincksieck, 2014; L’horizon, des traités de perspective au Land Art, P. U. de Rennes, 2009), an interview with Isabelle Pellegrini and documentation on the works.

Thierry Fournier | Non-lieu 2