'Uchronie': by Vincent Fournier

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PHOTOGRAPHING THE FUTURE

 

Imagine this:

The European Space Agency's Juice spacecraft has been launched onboard Ariane 5 towards Jupiter and its icy moons. / The stuff that's on our plates seems more and more to have been created in laboratories, a mixture of cellular meat and novel future foods (NFF). / The world trembles at the appearance of the artificial AI monster ChatGPT, a real warning shot that shows the awesome power of the machines to come. And yet The Terminator, that Hollywood saga, prepared us for this a long, long time ago!

 

Uchronie, an exhibition at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (Museum of Hunting and Nature), is dedicated to the work of the photographer and artist Vincent Fournier. It is an exhibition about an unsettling time.

Telling facts as they might have happened, uchronie is the name given to a fictional reconstruction of history that might have been different from what we know. With this title, the exhibition is seen as so many disturbing parallel histories. What if?

 

UCHRONIE 

 

Definition: // a noun devised from the Greek ou = not and chronos = time

 

A story based on a rewriting of history that makes it possible to imagine a world in which a past event has had a different outcome.

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VINCENT FOURNIER: MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE

 

Throughout his work, despite the variety of the subjects that he depicts or brings together, Vincent Fournier makes a lasting impression of trying to remodel history. He constantly presents subjects that open windows to other possibilities. The tipping points – choices that haven’t been made, routes that haven’t been followed – have taken flight. The denials take part in the feeling of nostalgia that sometimes arises here. And yet these moments have been real.

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Inspired by the legend of the Tartar lamb, a mythic animal-plant that at the time was considered to be both animal and plant, Vincent Fournier’s Flesh Flowers are the fruit of his imagination and of the story that was devised for his Post Natural Museum series. Thanks to the tissue engineering skills highlighted in the Post Natural Museum, these flowers produce artificial, edible flesh. All that remains beneath our eyes are the skeletons of these flesh flowers. The Post Natural Museum, a fictional scientific institution created by Vincent Fournier, is a project of encyclopedic archives that came out of a space between memory and an invented future in which new species would have been modified the better to adapt to our environment and to respond to new human needs.

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Here beneath our eyes is the skeleton of a Robotic Jellyfish Drone found in the Rhone valley in 2057. It is a hybrid, half biological and half robotical creature that was part of a squadron tasked with environmental surveillance. When the temperature reaches 30°C, the jellyfish drones auto-activate in order to lift water from the rivers and redistribute it through hydro-stress to agricultural areas.

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At the intersection of surrealism and technology, the Post Natural History bestiary imagines the possible evolution of the post-Darwin living world. These photographs reveal a collection of species on the way to emerging: a peacock with a silver, diamond-studded exoskeleton, a dragonfly with a fragile glass abdomen in which a luminescent captor is measuring air quality, a beetle with GPS integrated in its metal antenna. Engraved on a brass tablet, “scientific” explanations caption the pictures and heighten the likelihood contained in them. The strange familiarity of this poetic bestiary questions the ambivalence of our relationship with nature and technology.

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IN THE MURMURS BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

 

Are these the skeletons of unlikely animals, the transfigured forms of plants, or the sounds of an aerodynamic, infinitely mysterious movement transformed into instantaneous sculptures? In an old-fashioned display cabinet at the end of a tiny room on the second floor of the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, itself at the top of a very narrow staircase, are Vincent Fournier’s three motionless Murmurs. Two of these physical artifacts, of some metaphysical entity, solidified phantoms of metamorphoses forever invisible to the human eye, embody the skull of a mammal and the death mask of a bear that probably vanished a long time ago.

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The tick room presents various rare examples of winged insects with extraordinary powers: a dragonfly that can detect the inorganic compounds present in the pure air, a carrier butterfly that is luminous or capable of carrying the perfume of the soul. On the border between the living and the artificial, these “neo-beings” show their capacity for continuous evolution to adapt to different environments. They have been collected thanks to the Post Natural History programme. 

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ETYMOLOGY

 

Auctus, Latin = increased, augmented

Animalis, Latin = animal, from anima = air, breath, spirit, + suffix -alis.

 

The history of Auctus Animalis island tells of the transformation of hybrid creatures into stars. This is an initiatory fable about a bestiary of chimera taken from between two worlds. Finding no place for themselves on Earth, the species from Auctus Animalis island are going to turn into stars so they can recover their equilibrium. Standing at the intersection of biology and surrealism, Vincent Fournier plunges us into a world poised between the real and the virtual that defies scientific realities and proposes a poetic question about the transformation of the living being. Images from Auctus Animalis, a rite-of-passage-style musical and photographic fable, winner of the 2022-2023 Swiss Life à 4 mains Prize, from an original idea by Vincent Fournier (photography) and Sébastien Gaxie (music).