Selected by Pierre Huyghe
I first encountered Fabien and Raphaël’s work almost ten years ago when they were just starting on a series titled The Unmanned (2014–22) – a colossal body of episodic works that they have now completed. I was struck by the sheer ambition of the project, the timescales through which they were thinking and the alien perspectives from which they allowed us to look back at our present.
Their films – even though they lure viewers into thinking that they are watching the narratives of specific histories (of computation, of capital, etc…) – are not about anything; they have no story to tell, no meaning to disclose. Rather, they offer an experience of the contingency of meaning, exposing the fragile and reassuring enclosures we build to separate ourselves from an indifferent and meaningless outside world.
More recently their work has taken another dimension; fictions are no longer only exhibited, but take place in the very space of the exhibition. Reality becomes porous to fiction, and thus prolongs the ‘live action’ idea that is present in all their film-performances. They call these unbounded environments ‘concrete fictions’, a term that echoes French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux’s characterisation of philosophy as the production of a ‘maybe’ so radical that it is able to ‘transform our subjectivities in the present’.
This material operativity of fiction is at the heart of their new project – The Feral, which is set on a hill in the middle of rural France. There, forests, streams and fields as well as humans will become the support for the development of an inhuman intelligence over the next 1,000 years. Each year, artists will be invited to contribute to its training by transforming the site and its inhabitants – thus always pushing further the limit of the project’s hypothesis: the more domesticated a synthetic intelligence gets, the more ‘feral’ we and our world become in return.
Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni live and work in Paris. Their work has been exhibited recently at Mona, Tasmania; the Liverpool Biennial; the Biennale de Lyon; the Okayama Art Summit; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and Casino Luxembourg. In 2022 they published Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni: The Unmanned, with Mousse Publishing.
Pierre Huyghe is a multimedia systems artist based in New York who in 2022 launched a permanent installation at Kistefos Museum sculpture park in Jevnaker, Norway.
