Highlights: “Coming Soon – while waiting for tomorrow”, the exhibition full of surprises and avenues for reflection at the contemporary art center Lafayette Anticipations, in Paris. Between prophetic visit and divinatory consultations, balance and collapse, interview with curator Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel. “The role of artists in the future and the present is to always make us a little larger. This is the idea of this exhibition through a kind of Odyssey or a walk, to encounter all the different ways of thinking about this future, which is floating, which we know is going to happen, but which is not yet there’

The future, this “weightless space-time”, is an entire art and artists have always experimented and cultivated this relationship with the unknown. “Coming soon – waiting for tomorrow”, the exhibition…

Interview

“Coming Soon–waiting for tomorrow”, art, the future and our desires

The future, this “weightless space-time”, is an entire art and artists have always experimented and cultivated this relationship with the unknown.

“Coming soon – while waiting for tomorrow”, the exhibition full of surprises and avenues for reflection at the contemporary art center Lafayette Anticipations, in Paris, proposes to “

consider the future not as a place to be exploited, but as a place to let it come

.”

Between prophetic visit and divinatory consultations, balance and collapse, interview with curator Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel.

View of the “Realitarians”, a group of radical teenage girls, from the video “Reality or Not” (2023) by Cécile B. Evans in “Coming Soon” at Lafayette Anticipations.

By: Siegfried Forster Follow

RFI

:

Coming Soon – While waiting for tomorrow
, what future are we talking about here

?

Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel

We are talking here about the future in the present, that is to say what relationship do we have with what is coming, with what we do not yet know much about.

It is the whole story of our relationship with the unknown.

Can we control what we cannot control?

It is our concern, our desires, our dreams, our despair also regarding what is to come, which are told here.

What was the biggest surprise for you in relation to the media and the mode of expression chosen to bring back this future

What always troubles me a lot is understanding that we are asking ourselves the same questions today that we were asking ourselves yesterday.

The exhibition begins with a stele from 1550 BC from ancient Egypt in which people prayed to the god Ptah to answer our prayers and hear our desires to transform the future.

Ultimately, this is the whole story that is told in this exhibition: what can we put in place in our lives, in our existence, to try to provide a response to this unknown that is coming?

View of the work “Oracle III” (2022) by Chino Amobi, between cyberpunk universe and Japanese video games, in “Coming Soon” at Lafayette Anticipations.

What is the role of art, of artists regarding our future

The role of artists in the future and the present is to always make us a little larger.

This is the idea of this exhibition through a kind of Odyssey or a walk, to encounter all the different ways of thinking about this future, this kind of weightless space-time which is not yet defined, which is floating, which we know is going to happen, but which is not yet there.

In fact, each of the works is a form of healing, a form of response to this question.

Read alsoThe Lafayette Anticipations Foundation, art, emptiness and glitter

Fear of the future also sometimes has a name, for example the ecological crisis.

How do you take this fear into account

There is the ecological crisis, but not only that... There is also the economic crisis, the political crisis, the wars... which are among the themes raised in this exhibition.

The works try to provide a form of response, a kind of extra soul in our ways of considering these tragedies which are happening at the moment or which we know for sure will happen.

It's about trying to understand, about questioning our responsibility and our place in these tragedies.

Many works and I am thinking in particular of that of Nora Turato [

Croatian artist, born in 1991, living in Amsterdam

Will You fight

?
nobody knows what's going on

(2023), call us to question our own positions in this world, reminding us that each and every one of those who populate this world has a place to take in it.

View of the work “Teiresias appears to Ulysses during the sacrifice” (1780-85) by Johann Heinrich Füssli, in “Coming Soon” at Lafayette Anticipations.

The work of Swiss artist Johann Heinrich Füssli (1741-1825) depicts Tiresias, one of the most famous oracles of Greek mythology.

You also mention the expedition to the Moon described in 1869 in

Around the Moon
by Jules Vernes or the American animated series

The Simpsons
which already announced the election of Donald Trump in 2000.
Are there any other artists who have successfully predicted the future?

Yes, many have successfully predicted the future.

An entire section of the exhibition focuses on premonitory works.

We often talk about visionary artists and we realize, through the works presented here, that many artists foresee future realities.

We could say that it is fortuitous, that it is a coincidence, that it is a chance meeting of ideas and events.

But ultimately, we realize that artists are beings who constantly pay particular attention to the world, which probably allows them to sense things coming.

In a video titled

Nggamdu.org
(2021, in progress), a Cameroonian citizen deifies the ngam du with a spider.
How does it connect to the future

?

Bollo Pierre “Tadios”, this Cameroonian citizen, practices the

ngam of

This technique consists of talking with spiders, with tarantulas.

In this Somié village, in Cameroon, it is believed that in Mambila mythology, the most important mythology, spiders were capable of telling the future and that they were real oracles.

Since their disappearance, we continue to consult those who live in the soil.

In fact, they think that they are permanently in contact with the buried ancestors, so they will consult them.

When asked a question, the spiders will consult the ancestors who will be able to help the living answer their questions.

So just ask them a question via these spiders.

Bollo Pierre “Tadios” places the leaves in front of the burrow, in a kind of vase.

Then, the tarantula, when it comes out, will modify the presence of these different leaves.

Bollo is able to read them and translate, to be a translator from the non-human world to the human world, of the predictions of these spiders.

View of the film “The Last Angel of History” (1995), by Black Audio Film Collective and John Akomfrah, on the history of Afrofuturism, shown in “Coming Soon” at Lafayette Anticipations.

Other futuristic works in your exhibition come from Afrofuturism.

Afrofuturism is a very important movement, essentially American, but which then had an international propensity.

Afrofuturism is created at a time when African diasporic communities are exposed to racism, exclusion, stigma.

They decided to create this movement very inspired and referenced by Sun Ra [

1914-1993, American musician and artist who defined himself as a messenger and medium, Editor's note

] in particular.

As we cannot live on Earth in a decent way, because we experience all of these inequalities, the community will imagine itself in a future to come.

As a result, the film presented here,

The Last Angel of History

(1995), by Black Audio Film Collective and John Akomfrah, returns to this history of Afrofuturism, of this impossibility of living in the present which makes we no longer even imagine ourselves on Earth, but in space, in the future, to be able to experience a decent existential adventure there.

Afrofuturism was very involved in the film, but also in music and in literary trends.

Untitled (tomorrow is the question)

, an “old-fashioned” interactive work

from 2015 in the form of a ping-pong table, an installation by Argentinian Rirkrit Tiravanija who lives between New York, Berlin and Chiang Mai in Thailand.
In your exhibition, what is the role of the visitor in relation to this question of the future

?

Rirkrit Tiravanija is an artist who is interested in creating encounter situations through his work.

This work is central in the exhibition and can be seen from above.

What we see is two beings who sometimes do not know each other and who will find themselves around this ping-pong table and suddenly cohabit and dialogue together, responding to each other through this game. is really the whole point of this exhibition.

It is once again this interdependence of beings to also create the future.

This work reminds us that we are linked to each other and that the world is made up of these encounters, of these moments of sharing.

View of the American animated series The Simpsons in “Coming Soon” at Lafayette Anticipations.

Another very relevant work is the video

Reality or Not
(40 min, 2023) by Cécile B. Evans (an American-Belgian artist).
A group of radical teenage girls, the Realitarians, invent a new way of existing by practicing “

shifting

”

,

practices that became popular with TikTok during confinement.

Do you consider confinement to be a breaking point for our vision of the future
?

Containment and Covid were definitely a big marker.

Moreover, many works return to this moment.

This was a very powerful marker for the younger generations, because they found themselves at a moment of extreme precariousness and also great despair, regarding the end, the prospect of a future, of somewhere else, with the space and time that was denied to them through confinement.

As a result, a certain number of practices have developed, such as “shifting”.

Like Xavier de Maistre,

Journey around my room

(1794), we stay in our bed and then we travel, by dint of imagining ourselves elsewhere.

“Shifting” pretty much takes up this technique.

It’s about lying down and – through a meditation practice – traveling and imagining yourself in another reality.

The work of Cécile B. Evans asks the question of this reality that we inherit and how each and every one of us can come to question it, discuss it, call it into question.

For Cécile, the reality that we inherit is also an enclosing framework in which many things are refused to us in terms of perspectives, possibilities, definition of being and what it should be precisely.

With this film, Cécile really tried to give all the space to this youth so that they can tell us in what reality they imagine themselves and desire themselves.

View of the installation “Balance” (2023) by Bridget Polk, creator of the meditative practice of “rock balancing”, in “Coming Soon” at Lafayette Anticipations.

What needs to change in the way we implement and present the future to bring it closer to the public

I definitely believe in bringing hearts closer to works.

With my personal experience, I know that the works contribute every day to further expanding my understanding of the world and my place within it.

This exhibition calls, albeit indirectly, for a form of humility.

It calls for a certain form of distance from our place in the world and an understanding of the whole systems.

All these algorithms and these structures that we try to put in place to master things, control them, predict them, see them coming, etc., these are also practices which sometimes lead us into dead ends and also prevent us from to be in this form of welcome, of humility, of acceptance of what comes, of what we cannot control.

It seems to me that "the future" - this kind of religion which is that of our culture - had many qualities in that which pushed it to make great discoveries, to imagine itself ever more vast, etc.

But it has also had absolutely dramatic consequences, particularly for ecosystems and for living things, through the ecological crisis, among other crises.

This exhibition is also the wish to consider the future not as a place to be exploited, but as a place to be allowed to come.

View of “Untitled (Fakir)” (2022) by Clovis Bataille, used needles and blood on wooden panel in “Coming Soon” at Lafayette Anticipations.

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