The exhibition Mutual Core is part of research in the ecological, decolonial and ecofeminist movements that invites us to observe, understand and learn from the interdependencies and movements inherent to living things. The latter are understood and experienced as a shared fabric where each element communicates and acts not on, but with others. Living and non-living organisms do not cohabit, they co-evolve and coexist to form a symbiotic community within which each one plays a role.
Mutual Core offers an implementation, that of a situated collective thinking. A thinking that is the product of a unique territory, an island, a pebble in the Indian Ocean. To understand its density, it is necessary to embrace a set of data: geographical, topographical, historical, linguistic, geological, culinary, biological, spiritual and botanical realities. "The entire history of Reunion society is a history of interdependence, the feeling that we must share this small island and live together, despite the tensions, inequalities, and differences. We have always had to reckon with nature – an active volcano, cyclones, the power of the elements, winds, the surging of the waters in the ravines and the ocean – which all bring human beings back to their scale. And yet, men have never stopped wanting to discipline nature". Mutual Core invites us to explore a situated symbiotic community, implemented by artists from Reunion. Their works cannot be reduced to an aestheticisation of flora and fauna, nor to observations or descriptions of landscapes. The artists exhibited here do not see themselves as separate from nature. Far from naturalist thinking, they are not external or superior to the territories they inhabit. The artists exist with the consciousness of being part of a whole, past and present, visible and invisible. They form a "mutual core" – a common body that is made and transformed by time and by the intertwining of thoughts, memories, territories, and commitments. Here we are talking about ecosystems, plural ecologies, and multispecies alliances. About a plural and complex ensemble of living things. The artists think from within, in kinship with the earth, the ocean, the sky, the forest, the volcano, the rain, the birds, the craters, the reptiles, the mushrooms, the flowers, the wind, the insects, the ravines, the stones, the moss, the rivers, the cyclones, the corals, the dogs, the sand, the humans.
The works enable an encounter with different ways of manifesting our relationships to living things. For this, the artists refer as much to the island's physical properties as to its political, spiritual and mythological realities. Chloé Robert deploys a speculative fauna and flora on paper and on the walls. Emma Di Orio and Alice Aucuit restore confiscated knowledge: that of women and that of medicinal plants. Using essential oils from native plants, Georgie Ganné composes the fragrances of places that are made present by their smells. Like a surgeon or a biologist, Clotilde Provansal looks behind the mosses and trunks of the trees to venture inside living things. Inspired by the writings of Jules Hermann, Kid Kreol & Boogie summon an ancestral and founding cosmogony. Kako & Kenkle work on the land for a subsistence agriculture, a peasant polyculture to both live in communion with the soils and to live autonomously. Through the practice of gardening, Tatiana Patchama creates a dialogue between her studio and garden to cancel the very idea of a barrier between the inside and the outside. Over the seasons, Sanjeeyann Paléatchy picks shoots and blooms to sculpt totemic beings. In the same vein, we find an animist philosophy in the works of Esther Hoareau and Jack Beng-Thi. The sculptures of Migline Paroumanou summon the invisible part of living things. "We might see waves, ancestors, divinities, energies, vibrations. Let's see what we do not see differently." His hands plunged in the mud, his head covered with earth, his body immersed in the ocean, Thierry Fontaine's photographs show not only the physical attachment to a territory, but also the powerful links that exist between living bodies. Feliks Florans gives shapes, materials, and words to the concept of "the ravined": "it is the sacred, shaded space of the source, of water, of the zamérant (wandering souls), of the Maroons, who went up the ravine towards freedom". Yassine Ben Abdallah devoted himself to thinking based on the objects necessary for the traditional picnic practiced on Sundays by Reunion Creole families since the 1960s. The artists activate their senses, and our own: seeing, touching, listening, tasting, smelling. They march to become one, knead the earth and stick their hands in the mud, harvest to sculpt, plant to understand, cultivate to resist, close their eyes, hug the tree trunks, breathe, embrace to commune, diffuse perfumes, make the invisible visible, establish connections. For them, it is a question of being affected (or allowing oneself to be), and of affecting others.
Because they live in the density of time and space, the artists manifest a conscious presence in the matter of the world (Emanuele Coccia), and specifically in the matter of the island. They act in their spaces to take care of them, with a view to healing, to manifesting the metamorphoses, disappearances, pluralities, the spiritual, cosmic, poetic and political dimensions. The works in the exhibition invite us to decolonise our relationships to living things, and particularly to the concept of Nature as opposed to Culture. The artists practice deconstructive thinking: the deconstruction of universalism, of the search for wealth, property, individualism, the patriarchy, hatred, violence, destruction, exploitation, profit, growth, power, domination. Rather than using the dominant lexical field, they prefer to adopt other concepts and positions such as uncertainty, relationships, fragility, slowing down, solidarity, sorority, kinship, care, empathy, invisibility, hospitality, doubt, sensitivity, alliance, humility, exchange, discussion, vanity, resistance, and resilience. Without ever forgetting that they are only passing through, and that they are part of the constant metamorphosis of living things, the artists create a political poetry, a sensitive body language, a conscious vulnerability that aims to take care of a mutual, ancient body, present and future.
