CURA.

Marguerite Humeau, an artist of incredible eloquence, is able to transport her listener several million years away, to land them in the bowels of the world, to emerge from the larynx of an elephant, to give a eulogy for a sea beast, and to leave them, dazed, to the sound of the choir of all the human voices that have ever inhabited this planet. The only time I remember seeing her silent, as impressed as she was bewildered, with a reserved smile that seemed to convey both vertigo and admiration, was on her return from a visit to the Lascaux Caves. She had spent an hour in the “Sistine Chapel of cave art,” where she had discovered its paintings and engravings. The caves have been interpreted in many ways: a shamanic site, a religious sanctuary, a place for observing the sky, or a tribute to fertility. Humeau had, through her visit, taken on the memory of this place, the fundamental enigmas it conceals, and the multiple hypotheses that contribute to its raison d’être for humankind. She had visited a territory that in every way seemed to reflect her quest and her taste for the unknown, and she was, as one might expect, stunned.

Humeau has, since her beginnings, built her work around speculation. The first major project she produced was The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures in 2012, her graduation from the Royal College of Arts in London. It staged the rebirth of creatures millions of years old, a Mammoth Imperator, an Entelodont, and an Ambulocetus, through the rediscovery of their voices. Finding these voices is a priori impossible; vocal apparatus are made of soft tissue that does not fossilize. So Humeau worked in collaboration with researchers, scientists and others, to initiate a method that she has maintained for each of her projects, probing them with the limits of our knowledge, exploring areas of uncertainty and deploying new ideas in areas of doubt. The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures developed according to an artificial intelligence that allows creatures to listen to each other and evolve their language as they perform. We thus witness a conversation between distant beings who grow from their exchanges and metamorphose as they dialogue. Humeau thinks of her works as the characters of new myths, which allow us to experience the sublime, a domain traditionally administered and possessed by religious discourse. Her works are like portals to other worlds, parallel or past, and her obsession is to make possible a communication, a physical and emotional connection with entities as real as they are supernatural. The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures also testifies to Humeau’s ongoing interest in beings who have little or no place in our affective ecosystems. She wants to restore damaged or non-existent links, but also to make possible a physical encounter with phantoms who help us to see and feel the unimagined, reconstituted from her research and her dialogues with researchers.

I invited Humeau for her first institutional solo exhibition in 2016 at Palais de Tokyo in Paris. FOXP2 was an investigation into the species that could have spoken if humans had not undergone the genetic mutation that led to the descent of the larynx and the development of the voice. What could have happened if this advent, which is considered a genetic accident, had not taken place? Humeau questioned about fifty scientists as part of her research. The answers rained down, and the hypotheses turned to ritualized animal societies; dolphins, bees, and elephants. Humeau is particularly interested in the latter, for the ancestral relationship that exists between humans and mammals, but also for the strong poetic and symbolic power of the elephant and the human tendency to identify with it. FOXP2 was a two-part exhibition. At its entrance, a long corridor housed a sound piece in which the birth of human language is synthesized and played through speakers nestled within the walls. The second part was an operatic choreography involving a group of monumental sculptures linked to a system of pneumatic tubes and installed on armatures in a form of contemporary showroom, a space like an Apple store, where light is an essential tool for staging the object of desire. The concept of “luminous horror” accompanied Humeau for several years: beyond our society’s obsession with light and clarity, she is interested in the way in which an experience can be as terrifying as it is attractive, a theme she also identifies in the cinema of David Cronenberg. There is a scene in the FOXP2 showroom that repeats itself in a loop. The agony of the dying matriarch of a family of elephants is played out; we hear her rattle and her slowing heartbeat, setting the rhythm of the whole piece. Within a culture that hides death, glorifies life, and yet acts in a way that could not be more deadly towards the world it inhabits, Humeau draws our attention to the history of endings. The attempt to cancel death, through eternal or prolonged life, is one of the major quests of our civilization, and it makes life terrifying for Humeau. At the time of this exhibition she exchanged with Corine Sombrun, a journalist who became a shaman. Sombrun considers that we live in a world made of spirit and matter, of visible physical presence and invisible presence, and our challenge is to understand how to combine one with the other. The question of the connection of worlds, tangible and intangible, past present and future, are at the heart of Humeau’s concerns. Often, and more and more, she solicits the knowledge and sensitivities of women, linked and connected to different territories of knowledge; Corine Sombrun for the shamanic trance, Lucia Stuart for her botanical knowledge and her practice of foraging, Alexia Vénot for her gifts of clairvoyance. Humeau opens these territories of thought through speculation and the free exercise of the imagination.

For her project Mist/High Tide, presented in several and different versions at C L E A R I N G gallery (2019), at Centre Pompidou (2019), at the Riga Biennial (2020) then at the Biennale of Sydney (2021), Humeau asks if climate change could be responsible for the birth of spirituality in animals. She reads researchers, including Joseph Campbell, a specialist in mythology and comparative religions. For him, spirituality arises from the awareness of our own death, and mythological stories are a way of transcending “the end,” evoking scales of time much larger than that of the individual. The central work of this project was The Dead, a piece which, contrary to what its title would suggest, would go on to have several lives. It is a sculpture of a suffocating marine mammal, turned face up to the sky. To make it, Humeau was inspired by the evolution of color and texture in the skin of the deceased animal; she wanted the surfaces to be ambiguous, to float somewhere between life and death. The Dead, The Dancers, and The Air (A shoal of fish performing a breathing ritual in an attempt to bring their dead back to life) is a group of fishes which perform a series of breathing rituals that mimic those that have been developed in recent years by real species that are now aware of their own annihilation.

These works also evoke the issue of synchronization, of the collective; immersed in the relentless consequences of climate change, isn’t our only option to become a group again? The artist perceives the surface of the ocean as a line between life and death, and wonders if the contemporary deluge might not be the human species and its activities, which submerge, drown and destroy the balance of life. For the Riga Biennial that I curated in 2020, a time when the COVID deluge prevented the transportation of works, The Dead became immaterial and was described by a guide in the middle of a 1000m2 empty exhibition space. At the Biennale of Sydney in 2022, the work was plunged into the darkness of its own funeral wake. A song emerges from his body and surrounds the visitor; it tells a new myth of the deluge, from the first wave to destruction by man, then the birth of a new world. A new version of this work was then presented at the Venice Biennale in 2022, demonstrating with each iteration that these sculptures are like so many incarnations of possible stories.

The myth of origins drives all of Humeau’s work. For Ecstasies (2018), she investigated the Paleolithic representation of Venus, the prehistoric statuettes of female goddesses found all over the world. This project was an opportunity for Humeau to immerse herself in research of the first human trances and the role of spirituality in their development. She looked at the crucial place that the cave holds in these shamanic experiences, especially after her visit to Lascaux, and saw the wall as a film that separates us from the world of the spirits, to which cave paintings bear witness. This research was brought together in around fifty diagrammatic drawings, an essential practice for Humeau, with which she linked the birth of trance, language, and spirituality. Each sculpture of Ecstasies is a hybrid form between an animal brain, a woman and a Venus. The sound of the work is made up of the voices of women whom Humeau asked to become animals. The whole piece is connected to the museum’s heating system, the temperature of which rises during the collective trance of these actresses.

This capacity for artworks to be carriers of a metamorphosis, to contain in them a potential elixir or a possible cure has become increasingly central in the work of Humeau. For the DDH exhibition in 2017 where I invited Marguerite, which took place for a few hours in the burnt-out apartment of a writer in Paris, she installed the Lung B12 in the heart of this destroyed interior. This sculpture was a blown glass reproduction of an artificial lung, which housed  vitamin B12, an antidote for the inhalation of fire smoke. The work was thought of as an active agent, a vector of transformation, repair or connection.

The idea of ​​metamorphosis is strongly embodied in the Surface Horizon project at Lafayette Anticipations where I invited her in 2021 alongside Jean-Marie Appriou. Made up of plants, greenhouses, sculptures and the presence of a clairvoyant, a person endowed with “extrasensory” perceptions, this experience invited us to heal the present world and to imagine the worlds to come. The exhibition was inspired by the ground, the “horizon surface,” and all the visible and invisible interactions that run through it, as well as the potentials it harbors. Surface Horizon is a fable, an opera, a self-fulfilling science fiction. Starting from a study over several months by Humeau on the power of weeds, mauvaises herbes, which became the main characters of the project, the exhibition celebrates marginalized species, feelings and stories. Humeau deploys sculptures and “plant performances” inspired by the “theory of signatures,” an immemorial research project on medicinal plants in which the plant silhouette resembles the part of the human body that they can treat. All of the works mutated during the exhibition; plants grew and died, souls came to be transformed at the “Magicicada” pavilion, the greenhouse hosted encounters with the clairvoyant, the sculptures were elixirs for reviving forgotten emotions, the pastel drawings were navigation maps crystallizing moments of ground transformation; the birth of forms of life, disappearances, encounters between beings. Once again, Humeau wishes to make other worlds accessible to us. This is also precisely the intention of the upcoming project What lies dormant, an elixir imagined by the forager Lucia Stuart at the invitation of Humeau, to make the heart stronger and (re)activate potentials, memories, and lost dreams that lie dormant in each of us. Inspired by the berries of blackthorn, sea buckthorn and hawthorn, the elixir is heated in a teapot sculpture inspired by berry blossoms and artificial hearts. It is then served in several cups, in order to share this experience, and is imagined as a tool to open up potentials, rather than a prescription aimed at results.

Humeau continued the research of Surface Horizon during her exhibition Energy Flows (2022) at the C L E A R I N G gallery in New York, around the restoration of emotions that have disappeared or that would allow us to develop the art of being human. Each of these states was symbolized by sculptures of plants that help to access these territories of the soul,  thus making tangible the idea of ​​a symbiotic life between beings. The work Rubatosis, for example, suggested unsettling sensitivity to your own heartbeat, a muscular rhythm, tapping in complete darkness. Inspired by the Foxglove plant, like a music notation for inhalation and exhalation, it shows the expansion of human heart palpitations. Another work, Dilata (I), evoked the frustration of being stuck in one body. Inspired by the plant Mimosa Hostilis that triggers hallucinations and schizophrenia, Dilata grows all the lives that you could have had. Humeau is also evolving her production dynamics, creating works with organic materials; sugars, pigments that change with temperature, droplets that appear in certain climatic conditions, earth and ceramics, all materials that react to variations in the world. The work Rise (2021) marks the start of a new research and the desire to place her work in the context, time and space in which it is presented. In the huge park of the Fondazione Sandretto, the monumental sculpture is placed next to the Nebbiolo vineyards at the top of the hill of San Licerio in Italy, above a tectonic fault and in an area hosting the ancient culture of witchcraft alongside the more recent “slow food” movement. The sculpture alludes to the “tree of life,” an Axis Mundi linking the earth to the cosmos and is inspired by recent studies on the sex of grapevines, which have been found to be hermaphrodites. Humeau is interested in this story of a queer plant, whose culture allows access, through wine, to other states and spiritual worlds. This work was born from an in-depth study that involved the local community and experts: winegrowers, researchers on alchemical traditions and healers, geologists, specialists in renewable energies and biotechnologies, botanists and biologists. For Humeau, Rise captures an act of love between male and female that produces the hermaphroditic plant, but also an act of almost violent intensity, an explosion that tells of the birth of a new world.

Her latest ongoing project, Orisons, is as much a prayer as an oration. To be presented in Spring 2023 by the Black Cube Museum, Orisons will occupy a one-kilometer circle in the arid landscape of San Luis Valley, Colorado. The extreme situation of this valley, which has been in permanent drought for several years, forms the project’s starting point; here, for this work, climate change is accepted as a reality. This is a pragmatic approach that integrates new conditions of existence, which then leads to the question of what persists, what continues to live, when life itself is threatened. The work, following the tradition of Land Art, is formed by the location, and treats the circle as a door to penetrate the “disordered” world. Humeau’s objective is to collaborate with all the agents present on the site without harming any, taking the points of view of plants, winds, birds, and human communities into account. The artist thus looks at all the beings that inhabit this place, and especially the weeds, plants that are considered as undesirable. For Humeau, these will be the heroines of tomorrow, as they are capable of surviving the most hostile conditions. Within this environment, Orisons is devised as an opera of monumental sculptures. Together these sculptures resemble a flock of birds taking flight, with each piece doubling as a hammock inviting humans to take their place in this landscape, to experience and see it differently. Some sculptures are equipped with flutes that are activated by the wind. These instruments are like a sonic mirage, the sound of rain played by one evoking the vivid dream of the neighboring farmers. Orisons is thus a contraction of many subjects and issues of Humeau’s work: it is a mythical ecosystem intertwined with a real ecosystem, it feeds on Native American mythology for which the bird strikes the ground to bring the rain, and is activated by the forces present in this landscape, like the wind. The musical composition of this opera is random, it is linked to the contingent, to the season, to the rhythm of the world and the stars, and it integrates both time and space, while the instruments are scattered over a kilometer of space. It is also about repairing a relationship to this land which had once been used for the extraction of raw materials and for intensive agriculture. Humeau’s project is therefore to repair, to welcome the new world forming on the ruins of the old, by offering a form of hope that transcends mourning. It is no longer a question of dreaming of another world but of seeing how the present lifeforms teach us to survive in this one, as companions. It is finally a question of remembering the words of Nietzsche, “You have to carry chaos in yourself to give birth to a dancing star.”