Ne Voulais prendre ni forme, ni chair, ni matière

Institut d'Art Contemporain de Villeurbanne, 2017

The environment proposed here by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané begins with and spreads out from his artwork Phasmides. Falling somewhere between a modernist and anthropologist framework, this film is centered on the Phasmid (taken from the Greek, meaning “ghost”), more commonly known as the stick insect. The artists unexpected encounter with this phasmid, in 2008, was decisive, as it allowed him to engage in long term research around the idea of moving beyond Western dualisms. Stretched out like a stick, unmoving like a plant, this mimetic species is a master of camouflage, blending in so well with its surroundings that it almost completely disappears. In his text “Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire“(Mimicry and legendary Psychasthenia) (Minotaure n° 7, 1935), Roger Caillois defines mimicry not as some kind of mechanism for hiding from predators but rather as the desire to dissolve into one’s environment.

Phasmides, a hybrid form between diorama and living painting, shows the phasmid appearing and disappearing like some form of living paradox. The insect reveals all of the ambivalence of its being, an unsuspected affinity between animal, plant and geometrical form, in order to propose an image which is “so very strong and so very fragile”. Moving through environments which are in turn organic and geometric, it highlights the constantly evolving relationships that it entertains with its surroundings, cancelling out any opposition that might exist between the animate and the inanimate. Background and figure, subject and object, nature and culture no longer appear for what they are but rather for the relationships that they stimulate.

By placing all of these relationships in space, the artist has provided us with a sharp and critical tool: “if there are no more subjects nor objects, then there are no longer spectators or works of art, but rather processes of relationships of mutual transformation. Combinations of agents which influence one another”. The path proposed by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané thus constitutes an initiatory environment for the visitor, one punctuated by the trajectory of the light. Inhabited by the phasmid, a creature “with neither head nor tail”, it enables one’s gaze to be shifted away from the center and allows one to play with, and test, one’s own position. The visitor is perpetually engaged in wandering along this path that has been designed for them, quite like the landscape that the artist has created for the stick insect.
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané invites us to experience our own presence “I am always seeking the moment where the visitor no longer observes the work but rather his or her own experience; the moment where they observe themselves”. An experience of self, conducive to transformation.

For Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s project, the IAC has extended the limits of its capacity to adapt itself to the artist’s project by disrupting the conditions of the exhibition, communication and mediation, all the way to the very day to day operation of the Institute.
And so, the opening hours of the exhibition will change each day. As the length of the day grows longer through the spring, exhibition opening times will also increase symbolically, keeping pace with a natural rhythm. This original and unique experience will emphasize an alchemy which exists between the project and the artist and the place which hosts them both.

Curated by Nathalie Ergino and Elli Humbert

Photography: Teresa Estrada