QUASI-THINGS SIMULATOR

The project website : https://www.marielelouche.com/quasithingssimulator/

In the style of a video game, Quasi-Things Simulator offers an exploration of this landscape of steppes, whose outlines can barely be made out, and in which the only traces of humanity are indicated by the names of winds anchored in the relief or floating in the atmosphere, linked to variations in weather conditions that affect the bubble as the user approaches them. Protected by the soft window, they observe the rain running down it, or the wind that rocks it. Like a vibrating skin, this bubble is both a guide and a refuge, offering a diaphanous view of its surroundings and providing a multisensory approach to these atmospheric phenomena.

By immersing the user in this simulator which impacts the senses, Marie Lelouche aims to depict the disorientation brought about by climate change, which is reshaping the environment and disrupting our relationship with it.

In this hostile universe with blurred boundaries that has been created by the artist, the user can hold on to what appears to be tangible and palpable: these words that designate the winds, each of which provides a specific experience. And yet, the closer they get to them, the more these words become redundant, losing their conventional meanings, and transforming themselves into ephemeral sculptures inclined to be affected by the elements.

During this exploration, a voice can gradually be discerned. Neither explanatory, nor descriptive, it provides a narrative on the simulation that is happening, at times poetic, mystical or pseudoscientific, prompting the user to reflect on the impact of the disorientation brought about by climate change and on the possibility of relearning how to exist with a new atmosphere.

To create this floating, intangible environment, the artist drew inspiration from two short stories by J.G Ballard, in which the author sculpts evanescence and offers matter an agency, which acquires, as the pages go by, inspiring and phantasmatic properties . These “sound sculptures” have fuelled the imagination of the artist to also create a work made out of the elements. This inspiration joins with the notion of “quasi-thing”, coined by the philosopher Tonino Griffero, which Marie Lelouche links directly to her multisensory sculptures. Quasi-things don’t have precise contours, but affect human beings directly and over the long term. In this way, the artist creates an “atmosphere” that may refer to the gaseous envelope, traversed by meteors, that surrounds the earth, as well as to an emotional space.

Through this bubble transformed by wind, frost or snow, Marie Lelouche thus invites the user to discover her sensory experience of vision and sound, and be carried along with the flow of the elements.

Commisionned by Le Jeu de Paume – Contemporary Art Center of National Interest