Ultra-Cave

Above, a former electrical substation, constructed in 1929, converted into offices. Below - a hollowed-out space, suspended in the surrounding emptiness, insulated so the sound doesn’t escape. A box in a box. Sixteen seconds of reverb. It will soon become a recording studio — a symphony orchestra will gather here. For now, it’s a basement in a city that no longer really knows that it has them. The walls are made of raw concrete. Neon lights run along the walls. Gaston Bachelard has a word for it: ultra-cave. The basements of basements that connect to everything through the underground. Some prehistorians have suggested that caves were chosen for their acoustics — the places where rock resonated. Maybe we used to paint where the sound lingered. Before we decided what mattered and for whom. Before history. Sound never really disappears, it moves, it transforms, it reappears elsewhere. It continues to vibrate in the materials it passes through. Art has accompanied history. Laura Vasquez opens Les Forces with a quote from Henry Thoreau: « Yet [despite everything] we esteem ourselves wise, and have an established order on the surface. » It’s about this order. And what happens underneath the surface. Cultures relegated to their roots, submerged practices, forms of life that art history has masked, projecting itself into the future. These forces haven’t disappeared. They resonate still, transformed, underground. The 6th August 1945 changed the face of the world. Günther Anders gave it a name: the Promethean gap. Man has become infinitely small when faced with his capabilities of technical invention, incapable of adapting his imagination to the implications of his destructive constructions. For years, Paul Virilio took photos of the bunkers along the Atlantic Wall, concrete caves dug-out to survive our own man-made catastrophes. Before the ocean, only one possible opening — the window frame. Dead ears turned towards the open sea. Those who lived in these spaces already possessed, he said, the rigidity of cadavers, exactly what the shelter was meant to protect them against. The cave became the bunker; the refuge, a grave; sound, a forced silence. Here—thirteen artists in this raw space, these concrete walls, these neon lights. The works are not hung. They are placed, installed, haunted. They do not decorate. They drill. They vibrate. Shadow Cinema leans against a concrete wall. A work by Christian Boltanski, it shows lit-up silhouettes upon a transparent screen — archaic figures, horns, pitchforks. Proto-cinema, according to Werner Herzog, was what Palaeolithic man had made at Chauvet - illuminating shadows on cave walls to give the illusion of life. Maia Taber Ayerza stretches linen, pours rabbit skin glue, applies pigment in walnut oil, washes it away, starts again. For many days, failure. Then something gives way, creating something new between her and the material. Ladji Diaby’s sculpture 19/06/2024, 205 brings a dog mask together with one used for welding, an upstanding rusted pole covered in white feathers. The worker’s tool becomes the medium of a mythical creature. Every alienating thing can, through misunderstanding, become emancipatory. Michael E. Smith comes from Detroit. His used, flat basketballs, pumped-up with foam, pierced with poles, don’t bounce anymore. They are relics of a world where objects no longer function as planned. Saodat Ismailova films women around an abandoned Soviet flagpole, on a grave site in the desert of Karakalpakstan, at sunset. What these women communicate doesn’t have a name. But their gestures continue. In Inès di Folco Jemni’s painting stands a blacksmith, summoning a plurality of mythologies as she emerges from dark, magnetic waters. It is as though her strength came from there—from the depths. Kyoko Idetsu paints the city where words fail, — but she paints it nevertheless, and big. Her characters are too large for their setting, strangers in their own environment. Like a map of what’s happening down below — voices we no longer hear. Ernst Yohji Jaeger paints a skeleton running through the night—halfway between a tarot figure and an anime character, seemingly summoning two worlds that were never meant to meet. Renaud Jerez has made a sculpture that echoes its context. Wearing a Phrygian cap from the 2024 Olympic Games, a creature is on the phone, sitting at a piano keyboard, fuchsia tights, platforms shoes more demonstrative than Cinderella’s high-heels. A national performance. Two versions (left and right) of Songs of the Underground by Stanislava Kovalčíková: pastels on sandpaper and felt. Surfaces that abrade and absorb. Portraits of violent beauty, soaked in mass market fiction while knowing to escape from it. In the displays of Anne Bourse, there is a mimetic game at play. The artist fictionalizes a watch boutique, a sleeve boutique. Made with the Yellow Pages, and hand-woven fabrics. We make things as much as they make us, she says. Modernism purged the decorative, eliminated the ornament. Isabelle Cornaro foils the conceptual plinth through arrangements of small decorations made of so-called crystal. In Christof Yvoré’s painting, the frame hardly contains the blue balloons on the ceiling. No human presence, however: the more absent the human is, the more strongly its presence is felt. The blue balloons are maybe like bubbles: fragile shells where two spheres can coexist. Sixteen seconds of reverb. The sound lingers, the works too. It isn’t much. The world will remain mad1. 1 « Ce n’est pas grand-chose. Le monde restera fou » in Baptiste Morizot, Le regard perdu : à l’origine de l’article pariétal animal, 2025, Actes Sud.