Exhibition presented in Lille, by Tri Postal, on the occasion of Lille3000 / Utopia. For over twenty years, the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain has developed a program that explores the major environmental issues of our time. Over time, its collection has been enriched with numerous works that invite the public to see the beauty and vulnerability of the living world in a new light. Bringing together more than 250 works, mostly from this collection, the exhibition Living Worlds aims to challenge our imagination, questioning the limits of anthropocentrism, in order to reinvent, with empathy and humility, a new possible way of coexisting on Earth with plants and animals. Unlike Western tradition, Living Worlds encourages us, through seeing and listening, to consider non-humans as equals in a vast, shared world belonging to all living creatures.
The exhibition is based on contributions from a community of artists and scientists engaged in an aesthetic and existential quest, profoundly marked by the enigmatic beauty of the living world. These include American musician and bioacoustician Bernie Krause, Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, French plastic artist Fabrice Hyber, Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Pelechian, French botanist Francis Hallé, American artist Tony Oursler, and French filmmakers Claudine Nougaret and Raymond Depardon. Their works are among the most emblematic pieces in the Fondation Cartier Collection and are the result of many years of collaborative work between these artists and the institution.
Living Worlds also provides an opportunity for the Fondation Cartier to develop new collaborations with artists like Bruno Novelli and Solange Pessoa from Brazil. Additionally, the core of the exhibition includes a remarkable collection of works by contemporary Indigenous American artists, exhibited together for the first time in Europe. Their experience of an equal relationship between all living beings, both human and non-human, stems from an ancient tradition, from which we have much to learn in this time of environmental crisis. Many of these artists come from the Brazilian Amazon, such as Jaider Esbell (Makuxi), Ehuana Yaira, and Joseca (Yanomami), Bane, Isaka, and Mana (Huni Kuin), as well as from the Venezuelan Amazon, such as Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe (Yanomami).
The exhibition also brings together a selection of drawings by Nivaklé and Guarani artists living in the Paraguayan Gran Chaco forest, including Esteban and Angelica Klassen, Floriberta Fermin, Marcos Ortiz, Clemente Juliuz, Osvaldo Pitoe, and Jorge Carema. Les Vivants is the continuation of a series of exhibitions previously held at the Fondation Cartier, exploring the place that Western man has appropriated at the top of a supposed pyramid of living beings and peoples. These exhibitions include: Yanomami, Spirit of the Forest (2003), Native Land, Stop Eject (2008), Histoires de Voir: Show and Tell (2012), The Great Animal Orchestra (2016), and more recently, Trees (2019) and Claudia Andujar, The Yanomami Struggle (2020). Curated by anthropologist Bruce Albert and Fondation Cartier's General Director Hervé Chandès, this exhibition-manifesto was part of UTOPIA, the 6th exhibition of the cultural event Lille3000.
