Co22380 at Countryside / Saint-cast-le-Guildo

Co22380 
Juliette Berthonneau, Salomé Chatriot, Douma/Guittet, Samuel Fasse, Iseult Perrault.

Curated by Fabiola Mele

May 2020

Countryside,
Saint-cast-le-Guildo Brittany, France.
Hosted by Sajetta and CovidRoom
















































Like everybody else, we were in a hurry.
The situation took us as far as Brittany, along the Armor coast. Five artists, inhabiting together and inhabited by the desire to move forward despite the planetary paralysis.

Getting out of habits in order to create a new daily life, a small community where any exit from this ecosystem becomes dangerous.

Salomé was trying to connect herself to her control tower in Paris;
Samuel was unsuccessfully struggling to understand the new government measures; Juliette was collecting seashells for lack of an exhibition at the Milan Design Week; Salim was busy attempting to make his design mockups out of recycled cardboard; and finally Iseult was caring for the garden. In this space, she was looking for a structure. She discovered it: an old tree that fell last winter.

Give an old tree a second life by making it bloom. These new beds made from outdated trunks will be a refuge for insects. Over time, and perhaps for several decades, the tree will slowly be reduced while creating a viable ecosystem within and beneath the decaying biomass. When a tree dies, it has not yet fully satisfied its ecological potential. Ending is a human concept, the temporality of the tree continues to live independently, as adifferent kind of being.

Temporary Insects?

Here is the proposal of these five artists forced living together, gathering their energy to create a new ecosystem around a felt tree, made exhibition space.
Combining their forces with CovidRoom, they create a fragmented landscape in space and time through a numbers of screens livestreaming their activations in this natural place.
CovidRoom, founded by Andrea Parialo based in Roma and curated by Fabiola Mele, will extract these live images from Brittany to a Zoom and Twitch stream in order to build a new narration.
Co-22380 is presented by SAJETTA.

The idea of the exhibition Co-22380 was initiated by the artist and curator Iseult Perrault. As a curator, she previously ran Pazioli, an exhibition space in Lausanne and is currently co-curating La Totale exhibition, which next show will take place at Studio Orta – Galeria Continua – next October. Her work is articulated around pictorial researches, and an attempt to build universes for humans or for animals in 2D and 3D, whether virtual or real, uncomfortable and seductive. The installations she creates question human beings and their position in the world. Sometimes self-centred, sometimes, open onto the outside world, as a viewer. She questions the different ways of positioning our gaze in relation to our environments.
For her, the tree is as much a dynamic space in which to invest herself through painting and sculpture production, as an observatory to keep an eye on her friends who have been transformed here into temporary insect hosts. On this occasion, she imagines a monolithic structure that she paints, a new watchtower, a perch from which she overlooks the land, surrounded by strange living stones.

Salomé Chatriot focuses on the creation of physical and virtual spaces: she builds machines and installations where electronic sculptures and digital images coexist. Fascinated by the way science treats body[ies] through data-oriented objectivity, she uses potential futures and new technologies to shape a fluid, digital and precious identity. The ecosystems she produces always bear the mark of a certain healing. The well-being she wishes to transmit often involves the real-time diffusion of organic flows such as breathing. In the garden, Salomé creates parcels of breath, new visuals generated through the interaction of her breath and a biometric sensor. This performance, already presented in Geneva in 2019, evolves here in dialogue with the structure of the tree and the ecosystem of the garden. Surrounded by the delicate arms of the tree, her eggs about to hatch and her electronic devices, she re-embodies here Fragile Ecosystem. On the screen, the flesh is sublimated and reveals a fantasized organism from human to machine.
“Test 1 measured; no viral charge. Hormone levels stable. She blows into a spirometer with regularity. Her fragile alveoli ensure the sharing of gas exchanges between her body membrane and the hot ambient air.”
Pierre Alexandre Mateos

Human organism is also present in Samuel Fasse’s research: He investigates on the possibilities offered by the body as an instrument of creation. He perceives new technologies as tools leading to the design and understanding of a new corporality. This multiform approach leads him to conceive a plural work, where corporeity is the main component. Samuel has created an exclusive textile piece for this new exhibition. As much supporting the tree as it is necessary for its deployment, this new cocoon structure is in tension through the diffuse branches. In his global approach, he acts like a ship’s captain, bringing together an eclectic crew of researchers as well as other artists, composers, developers, and leads them to produce performances, installations, and sculptures.
On a smaller scale, his work often borrows from the nautical vocabulary that he invests through sails, hooks, pulleys, wishbonic structures… These elements are here trapped in the plant structure to form a collaborative harmony.

Juliette Berthonneau is a French textile designer, specializing in the development of innovative three-dimensional textile materials for interior design.
In 2018, she began her research on challenging industrial Jacquard loom and weaving technologies. Juliette plays with the adaptability of shapes in a dynamic process, fascinated by the poetic relation between transformable space, human motions, haptic perception and textile behaviours. Her ambition is to give a broader picture of the textile field, inspired by architecture as well as inspiring for architects. Juliette and Samuel merge their textile approaches to create a new net, hand-meshed with wire. They include some shell fossils found around the house. The resulting architectural piece is an extension of the textile cocoon, resembling both a pedestal and a rigid but delicate spider’s web.

Salim Douma is one of the founders of Douma/Guittet. Their practice blends creative research with a strong attention to contemporary lifestyles, emerging business models and the growing impact of technology on our society to deliver relevant solutions for today and tomorrow. They collaborate with startups and SMEs to develop innovative products and meaningful experiences.
For Co22380, he creates unique and hand-carved sittings with upcycled wood from the garden. He investigates the several points of view of the exhibition to offer a series of landscape proposals to physical visitors.