EXHIBITION TOWARD ALIEN COSMOLOGIES,

Prospective of an Anthropological Reset, 2021-22. Performative installation exhibited in the « Future(s) Field » program at HiFlow Geneva, and potentially serving as a collaborative foresight research device.

Five floating walls (2,80 x 2,70 m), color paper rolls, honeycomb cardboards (80 x 120 cm), diagrams (limited editions – pigment inkjet prints on mat paper), 600 images collected online (basic prints), color lighting.
Dim approx.: 6 x 6 x 3 m

Performative installation presentation (in French): https://www.hiflow.ch/himag/ouvrir-les-horizons-futurs-imaginer-de-nouveaux-mondes/ (English version due soon).
HiFlow is a new hybrid innovation hub in Plan-les-Ouates in the periphery of Geneva, where RBW is a frequent contributor and gives regular conferences.

Presentation

For this solo exhibition programmed in HiFlow’s Future(s) Fields season, Raphaële Bidault-Waddington exhibits an installation entitled « Toward Alien Cosmologies », going beyond the most advanced conceptual art and foresight experimentation that she pursues with LIID Future Lab, the research platform that she has been developing since 2000.

While the Anthropocene, post-humanist and post-truth paradigm shakes all our certitudes, it has become a necessity to open and create new visions of the world and of the future, what anthropologists call cosmologies. In these future universes, yet to be imagined, the alien is the human who needs to redefine sustainable life-styles and existential modes, AIs whose black-boxes remain “mysterious machines”, non-humans, viruses and other strange species fashioned by bio-engineers, and more generally the unknown and the future that we need to reconcile with.

Staging a vast pictural and prospective panorama (futurescape), the installation supports this cognitive and speculative exploration, showing the artistic experience can be a resource to address complexity and uncertainty.

As part of an on-going future lab pursued by the artist on Alien Cosmologies since 2017, the installation builds on a series of artistic, academic and foresight conferences, workshops and publications, in France, Switzerland, Germany and USA. Other research episodes of the future lab are in preparation.