ART CITIES:Bordeaux-Danh Vo & Daphné Le Sergent
Danh Vo & Daphné Le Sergent present two new exhibitions at CAPC Contemporary Art Museum in Bordeaux, reflecting the commitment of the Museum to function as a platform for knowledge. The CAPC (Centre of Contemporary Visual Arts) was created in 1973 by Jean-Louis Froment and installed in 1974 in the Entrepôt Lainé, an old warehouse for colonial foodstuffs, which would undergo renovation in the ensuing years.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: CAPC Contemporary Art Museum Bordeaux Archive
George Orwell was sure that the decline of a language had political and economic causes. “Newspeak” his fictitious language crafted for his dystopian novel “1984”, is built upon the reduction and simplification of language. At the appendix of the novel called “The Principles of Newspeak,” he introduces its vocabulary, divided into “three distinct classes,” A, B, and C. The “C vocabulary”, made up of technical terms, is the thread that runs through Daphné Le Sergent’s solo exhibition “Geopolitics of Oblivion”. The exhibition is a vehicle through which the artist explores the industrialization and outsourcing of memory in the post-digital era, imagining two fictitious retrofuturist communities, the Sum and the May, where an alphabet has been created to free human memory from the complexity of an image-writing code based on glyphs, pictograms or ideograms. The artist explores digital archiving from two distinct forms of writing: on the one hand, cuneiform writing, which appeared earlier than 3,000 BC and was invented to memorize debt and to exploit data relating to this transaction. This is the model we use nowadays to conceive of memory when we keep information in data centres. The other form of writing is Mayan script, which records the movements of the stars for future generations. Writing is not thought of here as a tool for capitalising on something past but for its predictive capacity. Today, when new ways of going about writing have resulted from the use of screens, from new interactions between the eye and the hand, and from communication through photographs, gifs and emojis based on stylised images and models as well as samples from animations, one is led to ask what behaviours are generated by this language. Actions resulting from this kind of information processing include archiving, editing, collecting, copying, and merging. Thanks to the outsourcing of memory (the Cloud), with its infinite storage capacity, the new Babel formed by the Sum and the May sets out on a quest for a universal language. Each of them uses both kinds of writing in order to transform images into a proto-script by means of graphic compression; the aim is to use this for recording their history. The May have recourse to scanpaths and linearity resulting from eye-tracking, which follows the trajectory of the eye in interpreting a virtual image. The Sum turn to ‘emotional objects‘, objects of non-verbal communication, devised in order to plot the internet user’s emotional state, thus creating a new rhetoric. “Geopolitics of Oblivion” presents a battle of signs. Where Newspeak was an attempt to restrict thought by limiting words, the digital image also presents itself within a broad spectrum of synthetisations, transforming what can be felt into a mere value that can be provoked. For William Burroughs the cut-up method was a potential “letting-go of consciousness”. These post-digital tools and signs seem to invite us to write our own archaeology of knowledge. Following the site-specific projects created since 2015, by Leonor Antunes, Rosa Barba or Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, CAPC Contemporary Art Museum invited this year Danh Vo for a new commission. Vo has conceived a large-scale sculptural project underlying once again his ability to articulate personal and collective histories, while bringing together a network of partners sharing skills and assets for the sake of a common production. His monumental installation occupies the Nave of the Museum, an emblematic space located at the heart of this former warehouse for colonial foodstuffs, that has been the hosting place of memorable past exhibitions which have accompanied the history of contemporary art.
Info: Curators: Agnès Violeau (Daphné Le Sergent. Geopolitics of Oblivion” & María Inés Rodríguez (Danh Vo), CAPC Contemporary Art Museum Bordeaux, 7 rue Ferrère, Bordeaux, Duration: 17/5-30/9/18 (Daphné Le Sergent) & 19/5-28/10/18 (Danh Vo), Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Sun 11:00-18:00, Wed 11:00-20:00, www.capc-bordeaux.fr
