Friday 15 March – Sunday 31 March
Liquid Forest
Isabelle Arvers
2023 / France
Salle Gilbert-Gaillard
Opening hours:
Tuesday to Saturday, 1pm to 7pm
Sunday from 2pm to 6pm
This post is also available in: Français (French)
Liquid Forest
The work:
“Does the white man really not know that if he destroys the forest, the rain will stop? And that if the rain stops, he won’t have anything to eat or drink? David Kopenawa*, Yanomami activist philosopher, quoted by scientist Antonio Donato Nobre in a TEDxAmazonia** who explains how each tree “sweats” releasing more than 1,000 liters of water into the atmosphere every day, becoming a vertical river. If there are no more forests, there will be no more water. The baobabs in West Africa, but also in Madagascar, are disappearing. And these trees, whose spongy wood makes them perfect receptacles for the community’s water, which turns them into cistern trees, have been dying for the last ten years. Liquid Forest plunges you into these vertical rivers, inviting you to swim in the baobabs, in the corals and to immerse yourself in a gender fluid way, in a universe that is more than binary and in realities that are more than multiple, because everything is interconnected.
The artist:
Isabelle Arvers PHD Candidate, LARSyS, Interactive Technologies Institute (ITI), FBAUL, is a French artist and curator whose research focuses on the interaction between art and video games. For the past twenty years, she has been investigating the artistic, ethical, and critical implications of digital gaming. Her work explores the creative potential of hacking video games through machinima. As a curator, she focuses on video games as a new language for artists. She curated several shows and festivals around the world, including Jibambe na Tec (Nairobi, AF, 2020), Tecnofeminismo (Bogota, AF, 2019), Art Games World Tour exhibit (Buenos Aires, 2019), Interspecies Imaginaries (Overkill, 2019), Machinima in Mash Up (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2016), UCLA Gamelab Festival (Hammer Museum, Los Angeles 2015, 2017), Evolution of Gaming (Vancouver, 2014), Game Heroes (Alcazar, Marseille, 2011), Playing Real (Gamerz, 2007), Mind Control (Banana RAM Ancona, Italy, 2004), Node Runner (Paris, 2004) Playtime (Villette Numérique, 2002).
From 2013 to 2016, she worked on art and research projects and curated and produced six antiAtlas of Borders exhibitions around the mutations of the borders in the 21st century, including The Art of Bordering at MAXXI in Roma and Coding and decoding borders in Brussels. She was also in charge of the End of the Map exhibition in the fall 2015 in Paris about alternative, subversive and emotional cartography.
As a tribute to Nathalie Magnan, her association Kareron produced in 2018 TRANS//BORDER, Nathalie Magnan’s teachings, a series of events about ecosexuality, cyber feminism, alternative media and situated knowledge. Kareron is actually producing UKI a Sci-fi Alt reality cinema by Shu Lea Cheang.
In 2019, she embarked on an Art and Games World Tour in non western countries to promote the notion of diversity of gender, sexuality and geographic origin, focusing on queer, feminist, and decolonial practices. In 2020, Arvers started a PHD on Art & Games decolonization.
Sound Creation:
Gaël Manangou, leader of the group Gaël et les caïmans, is one of Congo’s most promising artists. Not only is he a highly talented singer, he is also an accomplished multi-instrumentalist. He excels on the sanza and percussion instruments, and is also the creator of an original instrument he has named the Kulumenta, a kind of clarinet made from local materials. As the author and composer of his own works, he is able to create an atypical artistic universe, a music of research fusing genres and diverse influences.
Artist portrait:
Credit :
Isabelle ARVERS (France)
Machinima, GTA Online, The Forgetter and Moviestorm games, 10′ 56”, 2023
Sound design: Gael Manangou
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