CV119 - Geneviève Chevalier, Mirement/Towering : La Ménagerie et L’Herbier — Sylvain Campeau
Ciel variable 119 - Against Nature (Winter 2022)
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Geneviève Chevalier, Mirement/Towering: La Ménagerie et L’Herbier
Aménager le vivant | Arranging the Living
By Sylvain Campeau
Having become interested in classification methods, Geneviève Chevalier examines two cases, the menagerie and the herbarium, which arose from contradictory efforts by scientists to understand the animal and plant worlds. These institutions, dating from colonialization times, show that nature is well and truly a cultural matter, but also a matter of global influence. In the view of Sylvain Campeau, who comments in detail on three of her video installations, Chevalier’s work “enables us to measure the status of environments in the early twenty-first century.” “The term ‘towering,’” he writes, “could not have been better chosen. It comes from ocean science and designates a refraction effect that makes an object look higher up than it really is. The joy of knowledge is thus adulterated with a certain regret. It is saddening both to see the historical and colonialist foundations of their acquisition and to realize how they are used today to measure the loss of natural habitats.”
Details
Language : English & French
Digital Version : PDF, 7.1 Mb
Bibliographical Notice
Sylvain Campeau, “Geneviève Chevalier, Mirement/Towering: La Ménagerie et L’Herbier — Arranging the Living” in Ciel variable, No. 119, Montreal, 2022, p. 12-21.