Copier-Coller

Speelhoven / Aarschot, 2001 - Van Buuren Museum & Gardens / Brussels, 2016

Mark1

4 glass plates, cut vinyl or silver
168 x 115 cm

Curators : Isabelle Lemaître et Baudouin Oosterlynck

L’anature

As man classifies, counts and orders, he modifies his environment. Between this first archaic gesture and the post-industrial era, language intervention has increased tenfold, just as it has taken on new forms, including that of GMOs, to which Alec De Busschère refers in his installation. Associating the practice of genetic manipulation of plants with the deployment of computer tools, the artist aligns two current, scientific-mathematical and software-electronic modes of language, which have the particularity of keeping any human psyche apart, calling only on knowledge and rejecting any intrusion of the unconscious, or on global language to the exclusion of the body. It is no less true that this produces a flood of signifiers that invade our environment and modify it. Either four glass panes stained with copied and pasted texts reworked by translation software which pastiches the manipulation practised on plant gene, are leaning against the trees, simulating the uncontrolled outburst of science and the master's discourse which is correlated to it. To this, the work adds the intrusion of the subjective through the effect of reflection and mirroring for the visitor, who must, if not take a stand, at least step back.

Isabelle Lemaître

Paris, 2002