“Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
And the ways you go be the lines of your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
And your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses ¹ .”

CONFLUENCE by Marie Lorenz and LA FRONTIÈRE NE DORT JAMAIS by Gaëlle Cognée explore the notions of common goods and places. Observing the relationships between an environment and the organisms that inhabit it, the artists see their subjects as fellow travelers, from whom it is possible to move reality towards a poetics. They adopt an anthropological posture of “participant observation [through which] the correspondence, whether with people or with other things, is a labour of giving back what we owe to the human and non-human beings with which and with whom we share our world, for our own existence and formation ² .” By surveying territories, they produce new narratives like storytellers.

The exhibitions highlight the urgent need to reappropriate controversial subjects in a sensitive and cultural way, while preserving the dissensus ³ they imply. Indeed, “[artists’] interpretations are themselves real changes when they transform the forms of visibility of a common world and, with them, the capacities that any bodies can exercise on a new common landscape ⁴ ”. So, these goods and places of the common are as many sources of inspiration as they are tools with which to reflect on the complex and delicate relationships we maintain with our territories, our histories, our ecosystems, our habitat and our fellow human beings.

“An urban river is the best place in the world to contemplate the future of our civilization. By understanding these realms and our relationship to them, we might change course, not like the industrialists and city planners of the 1900s or 1990s, but in the comparatively simple task of shifting our own perception. ⁵ ”

For the past 20 years, Marie Lorenz has navigated New York harbor on a boat she built from scratch, using plywood and fiberglass. She brings along family and friends, other artists and volunteer participants, moving from river to river and islet to islet. This long-term process-work, Tide and Current Taxi, feeds a constant intuition in the artist’s work, that “when you find a network of forgotten public space, it opens the entire city ⁶ ”. As unprecedented, shared experiences, each crossing is an opportunity to document and map the surroundings. These elements are catalogued publicly to encourage their dissemination. They are also an opportunity to collect various types of garbage found in the water or on the shore, which the artist then reuses in her visual works.

From 2021 to 2023, she is collaborating on Newtown Odyssey, an interdisciplinary opera performance at Newtown Creek with composer Kurt Rhode and writer Dana Spiotta. The librettist’s narrative, combined with a specific scenography, aims to make visible the field of possibilities of these aquatic environments relayed to peri-urban areas, as well as the unique ecological challenges imposed by industrial pollution. The result is a recognition of waterways as social spaces, as sites where landscape aesthetics can capture the messy ways in which we relate to natural and unnatural things.
Marie Lorenz invites us to reimagine these spaces through a body of work that often defies categorization, existing on the edge of the ephemeral and the tangible. Through this almost daily practice, she is part of a certain history of seascape art, as well as that of a multidisciplinary contemporary art that brings together performance, happening and mesological aesthetics ⁷ in the construction of a mesological aesthetic. Landscape has been given priority, as it constitutes the sensitive expression of human environments. […] The mesological approach, in principle, takes a different look at reality: that of an integrated vision of reality while avoiding the binary logic of subject/object. […]. From this perspective, contemporary landscapes play an important role as a manifestation of the links established between human beings and their environment, enabling them to inhabit the Earth.” Lenice Da Silva Lira, “Pour une esthétique mésologique : les humanismes environnementaux en question” in Sociétés 2020/2 (n° 148).].

For Montbéliard, the artist chose as her starting point a boat she had built for an exhibition in Rotterdam during the global pandemic, but which she was never able to put afloat. It becomes the cornerstone of an exhibition that mentally follows the journey by waterway from the Netherlands to France via the Rhone-Rhine canal and, by the presence of the familiar vehicle, from the Allan valley around Montbéliard to Newton Creek in New York. Thus, CONFLUENCE combines textile prints, sculptures, videos and sound experiments to propose a narrative that represents both places simultaneously, bringing together fragments that could come from either through a game of blurring geographical tracks. The walls of the art center are covered with large prints made from found objects using the direct ink transfer process known as “Gyotaku ⁸ ”; a suspended installation incorporates fragments and debris from here and there; the boat is suspended in its movement and a video projection proposes a narrative told by the “voice of water” that unites the two landscapes in a single journey, these distant places merging into a single protagonist.

In her own words, Marie Lorenz was inspired to design this exhibition by a quote from the American science-fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson:

“Science fiction works by a kind of double action, like the glasses people wear when watching 3D movies. One lens of science fiction’s aesthetic machinery portrays some future that might actually come to pass; it’s a kind of proleptic realism. The other lens presents a metaphorical vision of our current moment, like a symbol in a poem. Together the two views combine and pop into a vision of History, extending magically into the future ⁹ .”

With CONFLUENCE, Marie Lorenz proposes another metaphor for 3D glasses, where we replace the lenses with “here”and “there”. The Allan valley around Montbéliard and Newton Creek in New York are two areas affected in different ways by industrialization or the short-term need to change their landscape. But rare migratory birds sometimes cross the skyline of one of the two cities, and the space of possibilities is expanded…

“History exists only through the experience we have of it, through the dialogue we create with what persists ¹⁰.”

The possibilities arising from the encounter between existing and fantasized narratives also form the basis of Gaëlle Cognée’s work. The artist began exhibiting in 2009 with Plafond collective, which creates site specific projects and considers the transmission of its practice. Since then, her personal work (video, photography, writing, performance) has also been nourished by the sites of her research, and her works, based on principles of assemblage, tiding their stories to History.

In 2015 she created the performance a Concrete Hotel at the C.O.D in Tirana, Albania, the trace of which is a video. It is a conference taking place in a building of the political power in the city. Based on her experience in Tirana, Gaëlle Cognée extends another famous conference in the history of art, that of the American artist Robert Smithson. In 1969, he spoke at the University of Utah about a trip to Yucatá in Mexico. Contrary to all expectations, the artist didn’t talk about his discovery of Mayan constructions, but shared his observations about one building, the Hotel Palenque. This anonymous piece of architecture has the particularity of being organized around sinuous ¹¹ forms, without a center, and of evolving according to paradoxical principles. Both in ruins and under perpetual construction, the site is as significant for Smithson of an entropic ¹² “de-architecturization” as it is of a local cultural history of architecture. Through the construction of a narrative about a fictitious place, the “concrete hotel”, Gaëlle Cognée in turn offers a subjective reading of an environment she surveyed for four months.

Gaëlle Cognée applies this process to a wide variety of subjects. When she moved to the Côte d’Or (part of the Burgundy Region), for example, the artist rediscovered an omnipresent figure from her childhood, Joan of Arc, the only statuary representation in her village. In this new geography, Jeanne’s memories are brought back to life by a castle where Jacques Rivette’s movie about Joan of Arc was shot. She then read Nathalie Quintane’s Jeanne Darc ¹³, which explores the historical figure’s relationship with the notions of labor, body and clothing, and the artist, in turn, decided to explore the contemporary aspects of the character.
Jeanne, déployée, sans emploi [Jeanne, deployed, unemployed] is the signature she gave to ads she scattered across the rural Montbardois region during winter 2019, calling on women to bear witness to their relationship with labor. At the end of a six-month residency- investigation, carried out in collaboration with the MJC André Malraux, the signature became the title of a book, itself a hybrid object made up of heterogeneous materials, from poetry to statistical documents, including bits of spoken and unspoken words.

This artistic, sociological, poetical and anthropological research continued in 2022 with the realization of L’Étendue de Jeanne en son territoire propre [Jeanne’s Extent into her own Territory.]. Indeed, “Jeanne carries - unbeknownst to her - national, warmongering […] and religious ideals, and now, to take her away from a political party that has made her its standard, feminism claims her as a woman who refused the role of mother and wife, a free woman¹⁴ ”. Involving the art works of the artist Marie Bette, the contribution of pupils from a hotel-restaurant highschool ¹⁵, the research of the ethnomusicologist Blanche Lacoste and the involvement of the actress Itto Mehdaoui, this video attempts to extract pieces of History to offer a non-linear version of Joan of Arc’s story. In it, she constructs her own narrative, from an emancipatory and political gesture born of her knowledge of the world. She “speaks and acts almost as expected ¹⁶”.

“Jeanne doesn’t watch her sheep in the same way after passing through the Street called Street of the Wolves. […] By the side of the road, there’s a large stone erected as a discreet monument; she’s been told it marks the passage of the last wolf. Jeanne wonders when it was decided that this was the last wolf. She thinks that, in fact, if you mark the passage of the last wolf, there won’t be another, and that’s how you end a story ¹⁷ .”

Jeanne’s storytelling has transformed her into a legend, a hybrid figure that the artist places in dialogue with the wolf in the exhibition. From the “last wolf” roadside bollard in her village, she travels through regional political, popular and media narratives linked to the animal, from the forests of Morvan to the street of the beuse ¹⁸ aux loups in Montbéliard. The aim is not to “capture” the animal, but to map its traces in affects and places. In winter 2023, she joins a knowledge-building group attached to the Morvan knowledge cooperative. This citizens’ initiative brings together people from different backgrounds to share and build knowledge about the animal, which has been back in the region since 2017 after disappearing in the 19th century. The video, GROUPE LOUP [Wolf Group], reports on the collective’s last meeting in June 2024, and looks back on a public experience that took place a month earlier at the Maison du Patrimoine Oral. Subjective feelings, facts and the reformulation of the words of representatives of environmental, agricultural and hunting associations are interwoven. The only witness to these closed-door accounts is a dog, the wolf’s docile, farm-raised cousin. The situation offers a contemporary ¹⁹ counterpoint to the trials of yesteryear, where justice was theatrically distorted by the religious and philosophical culture of the time, and carried out by the authoritarian entities guaranteeing “civilization” in the face of the state of nature. With its dispersal, the wolf story’s milestone was suspended. Since his reappearance, the stories have resumed. But what do they tell now?

CONFLUENCE and LA FRONTIÈRE NE DORT JAMAIS deal with our relationship with the “non-human”, with subjects whose “savagery” is read through their capacity for metamorphosis, which upsets the “order of things”. The artists’ practices create spaces for contemporary socio-political issues and the dissensus they produce, incorporating their capacity to go beyond boundaries, displace them and create new ones.


Adeline Lépine
Curator of the exhibition