Ánima Correa
Patricia Domínguez
Katja Novitskova
Timur Si-Qin
Jenna Sutela

Spiaggia Libera, Paris

14 March - 11 May 2024
Opening: 14 March, 6pm-9pm

exhibition curated by CRO
(Félicien Grand d'Esnon & Alexis Loisel-Montambaux)

The forest lights up, the ocean gains ground, the earth rumbles and the wind blows ever stronger. It would seem that we have failed in our ritual, that the spirits of the living and the non-living feel scorned. The race for development has hastened us to turn our environment into a resource, to wither the gifts of past harmony and forget the ancestors who forged our history. Can we repair the ritual? 

Et la guêpe entra dans la figue (And the wasp entered the fig) brings together artistic practices that explore alternatives to a linear vision of time and connect worlds that are often pitted against each other. They invoke ancestral technologies and hybridise technology and the living. Could it be that the capacity for adaptation, multiplication and hybridisation of species thousands of years old are technologies in themselves? In their search for non-human allies, some of them unicellular, invisibilised ancestral knowledge and augmented spiritualities, these artists are calling for a return to equilibrium, where humanity can learn again to live in symbiosis with its environment.

The title of the exhibition is inspired by the symbiotic relationship between the agaonid wasp and the fig tree, a mutualism born of thousands of years of co-evolution. The fig is its floral receptacle, which only it can penetrate. It is there that it is born, lays its eggs and decomposes. This interdependence also benefits the fig tree, whose pollen is dispersed.