Fomo - Fear Of Missing Out

Sextant & +, Marseille

May 14 - August 2, 2015

 

Artists: Scoli Acosta, Robert Breer, Rémi Dal Negro, Tacita Dean, Stefan Eichhorn, Omer Fast, Mounir Fatmi, Anne-Valérie Gasc, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Marina Gadonneix, Pierre Huyghe, Ann Veronica Janssens, Norma Jeane, Gordon Matta-Clark, Anita Molinero, Robert Montgomery, Alexandra Pirici, Elisa Pône, Stéphane Protic, Random International, Ryder Ripps, Fabrice Samyn, Jean-Baptiste Sauvage, Melanie Smith, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Stéphane Thidet, Penelope Umbrico.

 

The FOMO exhibition concentrates on three cliché diachronic and meteorological stakes that are characteristic of the contemplation of a re-erected landscape. Sequenced on three floors of the Tour-Panorama (alternately dawn, midday, and twilight), the show is also built around the participation of the visitors, who are invited to seize new epistolary forms.
“FOMO” is at the heart of the 2015 Spring Festival of Contemporary Art in Marseille which takes as a starting point the invention of photographic postcard by the entrepreneur Dominique Piazza in this city in 1891.

Already in the air and the spirit of the time, the postcard enabled a worldwide spread of fleeting moments, tender thoughts, and more or less remarkable sites. The inventor had been inspired by his exchanges with a friend of his who had emigrated to Argentina. This democratic tool allowed for travel accounts and correspondence, like a distant ancestor of our innumerable data exchanges today.

“The message is the medium”. This widespread statement is as relevant to the postcard as it is in the case of the images and information exchanged on Internet reducing evermore the long voyage that separates now and then.

 

DUSK: The Past Tense of Time Passing

Somewhere between yesterday and tomorrow, dusk outlines the succession of two moments. Like a threshold, it spreads in the form of a daily historical fact, an eternal melancholic return. To consider these new types of images, historian Thomas James Clark proposes a “palaeontology of the present”. This would in fact entail submitting our daily communications (and our generations) to their structures of feeling via the sedimentation of meaning, lived or imagined experiences and shared values. Such a study would probably allow the reconciliation between the ephemeral moment and our intimate experience of powerful nostalgia for a world that is lost, unknown and obsolete. The locus of a subtle statement, dusk announces the fossilisation of yesterday. The memories that remain of these fleeting moments project us ceaselessly backwards although we are moving forwards. The tale builds our relation to the world and the imaginary. Dispossessed voices or words, fictions with different epilogues, these narratives are built on the multiple voices which compose them: dusk is like the past tense of a narrative reciting the litany of “what happened here”. This tableau reveals a ruin. Dusk betrays uncertain times when everything seems to be rebuilt. This is embodied in the remains of a surrealist folly in a landscape and the imagination which is liberated in such an overgrown garden. The accumulation of photographs of a now absent sun setting seems to reflect an imaginary exhibition space. This collection meets the photographic impulses which we are constantly satisfying. As an interchangeable and permeable space, it exists “within” and “outside” the fiction it will inhabit. Tableaux of briefly narrated stories, historical and mythological subjects are incarnated in turn for a few seconds. The artists’ interventions within this diorama have to make the ascension possible via an architectural feature or the melancholy of a solar revolution on the walls of a building that is condemned to be destroyed. This is already tomorrow.

 

Marseille, May 2015