Exoskeletlight

The Musée régional d’art contemporain Occitanie in Sérignan has invited Naomi Maury (b. 1991, Bédarieux), winner of the Prix Occitanie Médicis 2022, to stage her first major solo exhibition in a museum. On this occasion, the artist is offering a physical and sensory immersion into a body of works, most of them previously unseen, that explore the boundaries between experience and fiction. Naomi Maury’s solo exhibitions are structured around bold presentations of her sculptures accompanied by ensembles of other items (films, halos of light, drawings, soundscapes, prostheses, and objects operated by performers) that reveal the traces of their evolution. The artist creates multi-faceted works that take the form of spectacular installations that blend science, experience, and mystery. By combining history, biology, and science fiction into a single disconcerting spectacle, the artworks resurrect the past while creating a fusion between the subterranean and the subcutaneous, the present, the future, and the dream worlds. At the same time, they revisit the notion of collection in the information age, as theorised by the sociologist Manuel Castells.(1) Naomi Maury creates what she calls “families of sculptures” that engage with each other, respond to each other, love and tear apart each other. Each installation consists of a luminous halo and one or more sculptures composed of metal tubing enhanced with one or more woven metal prostheses and/or orthoses. With a great economy of means, she creates amalgams between natural elements such as moss, coral, or wood and artificial or industrial materials such as plastic, metal, fabric, or neon. Situated at the crossroads of archaism and futurism, Naomi Maury’s artistic exploration seizes upon the forms of the living to invent creatures that inhabit a fantasised reality. The artist has created her own bestiary where ethnographic arts, archaeology, science fiction, and biology coexist harmoniously to create her Exosquelettes [Exoskeletons]. Her sculptures tower slightly over the spectators, maintaining a familiar relationship with them, as if to better reveal their disquieting strangeness. Each sculpture has its own place, one that is both autonomous and part of a whole. Placed on the floor or suspended, (1) Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society, 1996. In the “network society” that is succeeding industrial society, the social state is shaped by a new “informational mode of development”. This is defined by “the action of knowledge upon knowledge itself as the main source of productivity”. Information processing aims to perfect the technology of information processing as a source of productivity, in a virtuous circle of interactions between the knowledge at the basis of the technology and its application, all in order to improve the generation of knowledge, the processing of information, and the communication of symbols. 13/25 always in a precarious balance, they seem on the verge of teetering, of collapsing. As visitors move through the exhibition, they “become one” with the sculpted forms, skirting around them, stepping over them, brushing against them, sometimes at the risk of destabilising them. At a time when we are confronted with a biodiversity crisis caused by the effects of human activity and the “extinction of the experience” of nature (Robert Michael Pyle), Naomi Maury’s installations create the conditions for an intimate and sensory encounter between visitors to the exhibition and the bionic beings that are being evoked. The artist’s new film, The Meaning of Light (2023), which was shot amid the vineyards and scrublands in the Cabrerolles area west of Montpellier, is a synthesis of the artist’s latest creative research. As she explains, the work is like an enigmatic odyssey that takes place “in a speculative future as we follow a group of humans living outdoors among the natural elements for an entire day at the time of the summer solstice.” Combining hybridised, humanoid individuals fitted with prostheses and/or orthoses, luminous halos, and sculptures, the film invites us to remedy the present world and to think about the world to come. It’s a way of thinking that distances us from the present while profoundly questioning human potential and audaciously exploring other possibilities, ones that embrace values similar to those at the foundation of the philosophical inquiry into transhumanism. The film is expressly set against the backdrop of the summer solstice, the time of year when the sun rises to the highest point in the sky and lights up one of the two hemispheres for the maximum duration. June 21st is thus the longest day of the year, a time when light is a receptacle for the beauty of the world. One possible interpretation of the film is as an act of contemplation as it aspires to collect the glimmers of dawn and the fading glories of dusk. In the film, as in the performances she orchestrates, actors put on and operate the prostheses and/or orthoses that have been fitted to the sculptures. The performers are obliged to modify their movements because of the discomfort caused by these devices. Their “impeded” bodies are forced to invent odd movements of the limbs, tiny shifts in the torso, arms, and legs, and unstable balances. Together, they devise an original choreography that manifests itself as the apparel and accessories of the performative body. The notion of prosthesis/orthosis appears not as something that replaces/repairs a limb or an organ and reproduces its forms and functions as closely as possible, but instead as something that completes and distinguishes the human animal as a human being. This process of freeing limbs or organs is integral to the creation of an artifice, of an object, that is developed by people to propel their evolution and even ensure their very survival. These “families of sculptures” populate the exhibition and the film, creating a unique ecosystem that plunges visitors into a post-apocalyptic universe. The cohabitation and complementarity of the components, supported by meticulous sound design that was done in collaboration with the artist Aske Andersen, opens up new perspectives. The fragility and precarious homeostasis of the sculptures are reflections of life in constant mutation. In this way, the concept of prostheses/orthoses makes it possible not only to accept the idea of the disappearance of the body, but also to see it as a project for extending one’s being and affirming one’s identity. The body is no longer a sanctuary. It is distanced from its biological determinism. It is no longer experienced as a destiny, no longer an axiomatic given, but has become an object to be transformed 14/25 by new technologies. The modern world is characterised by a body that is subject to transformation. Naomi Maury’s prostheses invite us to transcend the notion of disability that they engender as they act as a repair or a compensation, and instead view them as a possible aestheticisation of the body. Their spatial formalisation sheds light on the nature of the processes of enhancement, eroticisation, and fetishisation. The metamorphosis of the body can also be seen alongside the image of the cyborg as a matrix of identity and a political messenger. The feminist science historian and primatologist Donna Haraway called for this development as early as 1985 in her essay A Cyborg Manifesto. The boundaries between humanity and the machine, between reality and virtuality, are liquefying. The Exoskeletlight exhibition evokes a hybridisation between beings and traces a mythology of the present time with narratives nourished by sensibilities, attentiveness, and a renewed dignity in order to reflect on another world, whether it be future or fictional. In this way, Naomi Maury allows unknown, invisible, and extinct forms of life to emerge in a meditative and immersive experience. Naomi Maury was born in Bédarieux in 1991. She lives and works in Sète. After graduating from the ESAAA school of art in 2015, she had a studio at ADERA Décines in Lyon until 2018. She then embarked on a series of solo, duo, and group exhibitions. In 2019, she undertook a residency in Thailand with the support of the Institut Français, before exhibiting at the IAC art institute in Villleurbanne as part of the Biennale de Lyon. At the end of 2020, she had a residence in Iceland thanks to the Artists in Residence programme, the French Embassy in Iceland, and the Nýló Living Art Museum. She then exhibited at L’Assaut de la Menuiserie in Saint-Étienne for her first solo show. In 2021, Naomi Maury won the Mezzanine Sud prize at Les Abattoirs in Toulouse, where she presented a sensory and immersive installation. In 2022, she was in residence at the CEMES centre for the elaboration of materials and structural studies in Toulouse, which is part of the CNRS national centre for scientific research; as part of this residency, she worked on questions of matter with physics and chemistry researchers, and held an exhibition in the CEMES sphere. That same year, she exhibited with Damien Fragnon at Mécènes du Sud Montpellier. At the end of spring 2022, she was awarded the Prix Occitanie - Médicis, and lived at the Académie de France - Villa Médicis in Rome from October 2022 to January 2023.