Afterlifes

"After the last generation of haenyeo (Korean women divers) disappeared, their bodies, slicing through the ocean in apnea, became spectral visions, remnants of a time now out of reach. Submerged by rising waters and the exhaustion of reefs, they left behind a legacy that neither conservation models nor climate data banks were able to mend." Floryan Varennes’ exhibition Afterlifes unfolds in the margins of this speculative extinction. A tenuous life is invented there, between memory and systems of preservation, where a final sanctuary persists. The exhibition proposes an environment where attention and endurance intertwine within an architecture of ambiguous signs: floating sculptures, simulated structures, organic tapestry, the song of mutant cicadas, silent performance—thresholds between the living and its operative modes. The space becomes a dispositif: between irretrievable loss and attempts at re-enchantment. At the heart of this ensemble, the performance Matriphagy extends these imaginaries of survivance. Conceived as a semi-guided improvisational protocol, it stages bodies dressed in white suits, performing technical and measured gestures that evoke care, repair, and interaction with an immaterial environment. These figures, silent in their presence, inscribe a collective and shared attention, embodying a discreet form of resistance in the face of the irreversible. Through this minimalist choreography, the exhibition acquires an embodied respiration, where fiction becomes tangible practice, poised between ancestral memory and futurist projection. Performers : 
 이정임 Lee Jung-eem, 이나영 Lee Na-young, 박준영 Park Jun-young This exhibition was supported by the Embassy of France in the Republic of Korea, Busan Metropolitan City, the City of Cannes, the Fiminco Foundation, the Campus Art Mediterranée, the Busan Cultural Foundation, and the Hongti Art Center.