OFLUXO

‘‘ What a toxic place to survive on an alien planet lighting by an alien sun. Lovely news that life grows on it, but we are not necessarily invited to live with it. It’s a different kind of otherworldly type of life that is precious and delightful. Origins are still unknown, so we don’t touch anything with our corrosive hands and we leave it in peace…’’

Somewhere, far from our eyes there is actually a world where exotic organisms co exist without us. In this humid and gaseous environment, structural entities germinate and sweat from a sort of humus nutriment base. Like on earth, the forest grows up and everything appears to be connected underworld at various levels. Fungus are here as always, and dead matter is re-used and transformed to host living mysterious forces that we don’t know much about, except one thing. These entities have some kind of a spiritual soul or something like a highly condensed memory directly stuck in that dust of which they are made. Everything in this distant world is also linked to the sky, and to the forms that we see in it, like on our planet. These shapes and lighting dots that we observe around seem to be living in a different temporality than the one in which extraterrestrial mushrooms, or we, live in. If we consider a vast burning star full of plasma as something alive, like artists and scientists do, then few things are non living, and everything dead can come back to life again. Sometimes everything is strange and contradictory. Occasionally, we can find anthropomorphic mushrooms, organic stars, humans spores and seeds or even volcano snails. Biology is not so deterministic. Life is sprawling and monstrously romantic. The origin of these multiples ways of complex life, that humans are part of, is what we must know. But it’s an open question without a precise answer that we can discover because of how small we are, and also because we are not snails. What we can do to know about the origin of life is guessing and speculating, being rational or spiritual, or even beautifully sending a rover on Mars. Whatever we do, we have to appreciate life in his multiplicity. In fact we must appreciate ourselves.

Germs Feelings Sparkling Quietly is an exhibition host by Atelier Saegher, with works and atmospheric installation by Asuka Takagi and Igor Fouqueray. Atelier Saegher is a fresh artist-run space operated by Alice Guerin and Mathias Moreau in Brussels. Asuka Takagi and Igor Fouqueray worked together for the first time for this show. They are both young artists working and living in Brussels.