Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni

INFANTIA (1894-7231)

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Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni create a multifaceted work in which films, performances and sculptures present alternative hypothesis of our past and future as so many possibilities for transforming us in the present.

After The Unmanned, a series of 8 films which retrace the History of computation in reverse, the artists have been working on a second cycle called The Everted Capital since 2018. This new project, conceived as a performative speculation on the future of value, attempts to produce, through each episode and via the protocols that they unfold, a fiction which exists as an alternative to that of capital.
Infantia is the exhibition of a birth.
Before becoming a museum, the IAC was a school. The school has become a child.

Within this child’s body, there is: a sunset at midday, immortal communists sleeping under a rain of salt, death as atavism, Lydian kings and money.
In addition to this: a hostage situation lasting 3 000 years, a dismantled earth, a starless night, an uprooted tree, Richard Nixon and the void.

Within this museum-child, each thing, each object, is the trace of an exchange, the remains of a fiction of value. The museum-child contains all exchanges but cannot be reduced to any one of them, because while everything within it can be exchanged, it can be exchanged for nothing. And though later the child grows, its infancy will not be a “before”, this age that we grown-ups have lost: not the inestimable value of infancy, a time before exchange and accounts; but the infancy of value itself.

At IAC, INFANTIA (1894-7231) presents for the first time in France, the prologue to The Everted Capital along with its first two episodes. Each of these films, with a run time of around 24 hours, shows bodies tested by a repeated fiction and its gradual transformation under the effect of time of the inevitable fatigue of its protagonists.
For the exhibition, the protocols at work in the films are restituted in the space, the  visitor becomes the witness.
Fiction flows into reality and transforms it. It becomes both the standard for measuring time and space: the hours dilate, the spaces dissolve and the objects are transformed.

The walls, crossed by a section determined by the orientation axis of the Earth, remind us of its dismantling in progress in episode 2 of The Everted Capital (1971-4936).
From these walls flows a salty fluid which crystallizes and infiltrates everything in its path, including the sleeping bodies of the immortal communists of episode 1 (1894-7231).
Salt masks, reminiscent of the money used by the children in the film, are scattered and diluted under the drip of a so-called clepsydra. The light varies from noon to midnight.
Mold grows and spreads.
All the processes in place are ways of measuring the passage of time and thus extend the idea already present in each of these performance films.

On the same axis as the section, perforated objects are connected by a structure in permanent rotation, which is multiplied and deployed beyond the building.
Each rotating object, which crystallizes a little more each day, is filmed by an artificial intelligence seeking to recognize in the reality what it was trained for, and reconstructs live the mutant face of a newborn baby.

It is the set of conditions and intersections between reality, story and artifice that manifests itself in the present by the continuous emergence of this child. This child of a new kind restores for us the hypothesis of another possible world where we would be neither mortal nor immortal, but "more than life".

Anne Stenne,
Curator of The exhibition

The Everted Capital - The Axiom, Season 2, Prologue, 2018

The Axiom is the prologue to The Everted Capital. It shows the abstract nature of a landscape entirely composed of elements that have been employed as currency throughout human history. Its rocky ground is made up of a wide range of minerals used in the fabrication of pre-metallic currencies. Its flora is an assembly of heterogeneous plants whose fruits and
fibers have been transformed into currencies all over the world. Its fauna is an improbable juxtaposition of tiny living species whose shells, teeth, fur and feathers have been used as money.
In a future where the sun has become exctinct, the film was shot in total darkness, showing the internal heat of all of the elements which compose its discontinuous landscape and the exchanges of temperature between them.

The Everted Capital (1894-7231), Season 2, Episode 1, 2018

It is 7231, and the Earth was dismantled long ago, the memory of what it was has been forgotten.
A group of immortal communists now lives on a Dyson sphere – a superstructure built around the sun, capable of absorbing all of its energy.
They are faced with the reemergence of death and of monetary transaction as atavisms of our own world in this other world. 24 humans repeat the same hour 24 times. Each hour, a human dies. The diminished community adapts or morphs.
At the end of the 24th hour, only one remains: an immortal newborn living forever in the empty spaces of the museum.

The Everted Capital (1971- 4936), Season 2, Episode 2, 2019

August 15th, 1971, as the process of dismantling the Earth through the acceleration of its rotation has begun, a group of mortals takes a family of immortals hostage, declaring that they are ready to die with the Earth. As a television crew enters the building and interviews the mortals, a child is born.
3000 years later, the dismantling of the Earth is almost finished, we follow the life of the last of the mortals – 82 generations later – as she endlessly repeats the hostage situation of August 1971.
Once again, a child is born.
She is the product of a crossbreeding between mortals and immortals. Neither mortal nor immortal, it is “more than life”. An artificial intelligence transforms objects and spaces into this mutating newborn. The film is generated in real time and continues to change form indefinitely.

→ Until may 16: 24 h Livestream on IAC Facebook page from the exhibition INFANTIA (1894-7231), every Friday from noon to noon.
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