en français

With a title that refers to Deleuze and Guattari and to the importance of “thinking in the middle and thinking the middle, (…) leaving the tree-thinking with its ups and downs, its alphas and omegas, becoming a grass-thinker who grows and thinks! “, Hantu(Weber+Delsaux) present their work in ‘Comme l’herbe pousse’ on the four levels of the exhibition space 3 Rue Française of Miss China. Thinking about the middle here also becomes thinking about the environment. On show are plant sculptures – seedbeds reminiscent of those used in Ancient Egypt to prove that life continued after death -, pieces of sewn fabric and ritual ceramics from a hypothetical archaeological excavation and whose use is unknown, drawings and photographs.

The images are taken from performances carried out between 2012 and 2020, in forests and then in urban areas, in a context where humans mistreat the planet and where the deaf violence that oppresses us sometimes erupts where we do not expect it. They celebrate an idea of nature transmitted by ancestral rites (Sulawesi/Indonesia, Egypt…), and then remind us how much this nature, which constitutes us as much as it surrounds us, is at once resilient, opportunistic and amoral.

Hantu’s latest works (photographs and drawings) are clearly a call to a rewilding. Objects that serve no purpose, that graft themselves onto the body to constrain it unnecessarily, photographs of performances that grow like these grasses, wise or foolish, insinuating themselves into the few spaces that we are still willing to leave them, the cracks, the gaps, the interstices, inviting us to nourish a ‘Saxifrage’ energy, to blow up the implacable logic that silences even the most fragile desire.

On the day of the opening, this space will be reactivated by a collective performance entitled “Comme l’herbe pousse” (As the grass grows) with 8 performers: Michiko Fou, Hantu, Isabelle Maurel, Simona Polvani, Stella-Goldschmitt, Bonnie Tchien.

.Hantu(Weber+Delsaux) is a duo of performers whose work deals with the memory of the body and the ghosts it carries within. For Hantu the body is a device endowed with a power that reveals the material and immaterial flows that pass through it, the forces that inhabit it, the interactions and impalpable links that are established with the entities around it: it is at the same time a medium and a privileged field of investigation.
Pascale Weber trained in environmental design in Paris (École Sup. de Design Indus.) then went on to study Art and Art Sciences at the Sorbonne (Paris 1-St Charles). In parallel with performance, she practices in particular butoh dance, waking dream and other directed journeys, vocal techniques from joik, a form of throat or diphonic singing, and among somatic disciplines, the Feldenkrais method.
Jean Delsaux studied Fine Arts with a specialisation in digital images at the University of Paris 8. He co-directed Brouillard précis, a creative workshop in computer graphics and video images, for 15 years in Marseille. He practices photography and video and relies in his artistic work on his experience of Bio-energy and Tai-Qi-Chuan.

* Gilles CHATELET, ‘Pour Gilles Deleuze, penseur du déclic’ in Libération, 6 April 1996.

Upcoming
A performance without an audience filmed on the evening of 10 November in the exhibition will be presented at the Mucem, Marseille in December 2020 (as part of the “Tout un monde à l’arrêt” event jointly organised by Aix-Marseille University and the Mucem). The 30-minute film will be entitled “Nature Vive”.

Comme l’herbe pousse
Espace 3 Rue Française
75001 Paris

11 au 17 novembre 2020

Attention : Due to the new lockdown, the exhibition will take place but will unfortunately not be open to the public.

The opening via zoom is foreseen Wednesday 11 november at 5pm  – https://zoom.univ-paris1.fr/j/94189106368?pwd=VmxwM05KdEcybkNMbEVSQnIvY0EzZz09.

The exhibition will be filmed and the film will be distributed via the site of Bureau Doove on social media the day of the opening.

Series Comme l’herbe pousse 
This series of performances is based on our relationship to nature, not a nature in front of us, but a nature which we are part of. The ceramics that Pascale wears hold earth and “weeds” : the series speaks of enwilding, of our struggle for survival similar to the survival of the plant in an urban environment : slipping into the interstices, into crevices, into abandoned places that escape control.