Symbiosium 2_Cosmologies Speculatives #Abyssal, Sideral & Synthétique
A Seat for the Sea will be part of the fascinating festival, Symbiosium 2_Cosmologies Speculatives #Abyssal, Sideral & Synthétique, with an immersive installation | Porcelain and sound creation
Galerie, 127-129 rue Saint-Martin, Paris
As part of the opening of the Symbiosium anarkhe-exhibition and the Nuit des Musées on 16 and 17 May, the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles in Paris is hosting the duo Greet Brauwers & Raf Custers for a discussion of their interactive installation A Seat for the Sea_Shells. A Seat for the Sea_Shells is a sensory and critical experience, where immersion in sound and touch reveals the tensions between oceanic fascination and extractivist violence.
Man and the sea stand in tension in an indefinable pulsation. Any attempt by humans to immerse themselves in the sea is dazzling, any bath marvels, and yet frustrates us because this element is strange to us. This installation leads the audience into another ambiguity. It captures the serene sound of the ocean, but is confronted by unsettling printed words and, at regular intervals, a brutal metallic creaking. Harmony more than undermined, that's what also awaits the seabed when excavators sink their teeth into polymetallic crusts and nodules.
A Seat for the Sea introduces us to a new kind of violence, that of deep-sea mining. This extractivism is imminent. It is going after the metals in the ocean. No one can estimate its impact.
Let's descend into the half-light of a marine micro-cosmos. With a shell to your ear, you can hear the sea, smell the sea and touch the seaweed. Let's immerse ourselves in this soothing force. Let's stay and resist in this posture for as long as we can. Until the rhetoric softens and justifies the colonisation of this virgin territory. Like a haptic portal, the installation takes a critical look at the emerging industry of deep-sea mining. This adventure forks, at times carried away by a techno-seductive confusion intended by the industrialists. Then it quickly rejoins the organisms of the deep sea, the currents, the sediments, the long history: our fellow travellers, in their element.
The installation was realised with the support of the National Lottery
16-05-25
Galerie, 127-129 rue Saint-Martin, Paris
