Scattering – The Beginning of a New Adventure

Critical Zones | Exhibition closing and concert

[09.01.2022]

Guests:

Bruno Latour, curator of Critical Zones
Jérôme Gaillardet, geochemist
Jean Pierre Seyvos, composer
Les Epopées (Marie-Suzanne de Loye and Agnès Boissonnot-Guilbault, bass viol, Arnaud Condé, recorder, bassoon and dulcian)
Claire Lefilliâtre, soprano
Stéphane Fuget, direction and organ
Olivier Duperron, sound designer
Médéric Collignon, vocalist
Benjamin Miller, sound engineer
Benoît Verjat, research designer
Produced by Chantal Latour

Let’s close the exhibition »Critical Zones« with a bang! Join us for a collective listening experience on zoom, carried by an original music composition, a shared reading and discussion with Bruno Latour and other guests. Let us celebrate the end of the physical show and the beginning of its scattering. Bring your best headphones!

The exhibition Critical Zones has recreated in ZKM from May 2020 to January 2022 the tiny surface of the Earth that has been modified by life over the eons. This recreation has been done through an extraordinary mix of science and art. It has resisted the pandemic and has given birth to a marvellous catalog published at MIT that will assemble for a long time to come the work of all the participants. But exhibitions, even “thought exhibitions”, are not made to last, they are part of what is called in French “spectacles vivants”. Like a concert, a play or a dance they are given to the public which has to be present to appreciate their beauty, and then, and then, and then they vanish and remain in the memory of their visitors. This is why they are alive.

But in this case, we wish Critical Zones not only to live in the memory of its audience or through the pages of its catalog, but to shift into another life. Not only because a part of it will travel to India, but because we wish it to close with a bang! Or, rather with a form of dispersion. Yes, we wish that the rather sad moment of the finissage, on January 9, 2022, be transformed into a distribution of its intuitions, ideas and pronouncements to many other people. A scattering! For this, no medium is better than music, and nothing better in music than what Is called “scat” in Jazz. So on that fateful day, an original musical composition by Jean-Pierre Seyvos, interspersed with readings from the works of one of the curators, Bruno Latour, and the main scientist responsible for the show, the geochemist Jerome Gaillardet, will help celebrate both the end of the physical show and the beginning of its scattering. Since the pandemic seems to be rather obstinate in closing down meetings, we will resist its threat by doing the ceremony online through innovative techniques in the same way we did the opening. Long live Critical Zones.