"Artificialis" by Laurent Grasso. Post-Anthropoceneworld at Musée d’Orsay

09/01/2021. [PAR] France
metalocus, MARÍA ANASTIDAS

The Musée d’Orsay, in Paris, is specialise in the art of the 19th and early 20th centuries, however, to mark the reopening of cultural venues across France on 15th December 2020, until early May 2021, its most prominently featured artwork will be a hypnotic contemporary video piece announcing their latest exhibition, 'The Origins of the World: The Invention of Nature in the 19th Century'.

French artist Laurent Grasso was invited in 2017 by the Musée d'Orsay to produce a large-scale work in dialogue with the exhibition event The Origins of the World. The Invention of Nature in the Century of Darwin.

Screen shoot from Artificialis, 2020, Film HR, 27’33’’ by Laurent Grasso, Paris 2020. Image by Studio Laurent Grasso, courtesy Perrotin

Screen shoot from Artificialis, 2020, Film HR, 27’33’’ by Laurent Grasso, Paris 2020. Image by Studio Laurent Grasso, courtesy Perrotin

Artificialis, 2020, Film HR, 27’33’’ by Laurent Grasso, Paris 2020.

The new film is displayed at the back of the main nave, on a giant screen that stretches between two towers screening as an installation. In line with Darwinian research, for three years, the Laurent Grasso studio has been undertaking research into man’s irremediable transformation of the natural world, and how nature and culture are becoming inseparably intertwined.

Artificialis is an exploration of nature told through human perception, inviting the audience to think on the developments, mutations and transformations of living things but in the context of a hyper-acceleration of these changes and a paroxystic hybridisation of humans and non-humans.

“The idea of artificiality has been in my work for a very long time,” says the artist, who uses anachronism and hybridity to shift our states of consciousness. “I’ve always tried to give a virtual form to the world through aerial views and color changes.”

The film poses the question of exploring a world mapped out by satellite, a hyper-connected world, where space and time are compressed, and in which discoveries are linked more to a conceptual, prospective and experimental geography than to a physical journey such as that undertaken by Darwin on HMS Beagle.

Rather than choosing an actual shoot as in its previous films, Laurent Grasso studioshows an ambiguous, spectral territory in full mutation where reality and virtuality cross over and the issue of exploration today is to be found more in the challenges of analysing big data than in accumulating new data to interpret.

The arrival of the COVID 19 crisis has tragically corroborated the insights that developed as the project advanced. In other words, landmarks dissolve into an imagined space; geysers spew flames across an Arctic landscape, the acid pools of the Danakil Depression evoke a Martian landscape, and a densely wooded forest is rendered almost invisible thanks to LIDAR and microscopic scanners.