Surface Horizon

Through several scenes evoking catastrophe, renewal, truce, cosmic times or otherworldly places, the scenario of the exhibition Surface Horizon, imagined by Marguerite Humeau, takes the form of a walk in which the visitor encounters these evocative landscapes. Composed of plants, greenhouses, sculptures and the presence of a person gifted with "extrasensory" perceptions, this experience invites us to think about future worlds and to heal the present one.  

The exhibition is inspired by the ground and all the visible and invisible interactions that run through it, as well as the potentials it holds. Drawing on the history of our relationship with the earth, the exhibition explores the contamination, depletion and burning of the earth caused by part of the human species. Against a territorial and exclusive vision, the artists perceive the earth as a place of exchange and interdependence. Surface Horizon is a fable, an opera, a science fiction composed of the two artists' mixed works.

Starting with a months-long study by Marguerite Humeau on the power of "weeds", which have become the main characters of this project, the exhibition celebrates marginalized species, feelings and stories. Marguerite Humeau deploys sculptures and "plant performances" inspired by the theory of signatures, an immemorial research on medicinal plants which sees in their silhouettes the shape of the parts of the human body that they can heal. Jean-Marie Appriou's scenes, from the myth of the human "gatherer-sower-gleaner" to the community of Japanese Ama, free-diving fisherwomen, turn human and non-human relationships into fantastic and dreamlike visions conducive to metamorphosis.

The exhibition is a tribute to the "disappeared" of our physical and mental landscapes, those absent from our minds and our imaginations. How, at a time when the role of our humanity is to be reinvented, can we draw inspiration from these presences and praise the diversity of voices that make up our worlds? How, like the soil, can we become the humus of future life, the guarantee of the fertility of life, rather than its disappearance?

Surface Horizon proposes a hybridization between beings and sketches out a mythology of the present times, narratives nourished by sensibilities, attentions, and renewed dignities, reflecting on another world, perhaps still sleeping under our feet.

Curator: Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel

In collaboration with the CAP Paysagiste and BTS Aménagement Paysager classes of the Lycée horticole de Montreuil and their teachers Christophe Bonamy and Jacques Taffin.

In partnership with Libération, Télérama, Trax and Radio Nova.