SMITH
Outer

Tell me how you tell it; I’ll tell you what it is that you’re building. – Isabelle Stengers¹

THÉRÈSE ST-GELAIS

With SMITH, assignment and stability have no place. The artist entrusts to fabulation the requisite latitude to invent narratives and propose mutations that destabilize our way of thinking by teleporting it to new imaginaries.

It is difficult to put into words the undecidable aspects of identity, but also the performance of an “outer-gender” that distances itself from conformity. In SMITH, intelligibility now lies in the porosity of boundaries and a perpetual transition, as Paul B. Preciado has called for.

In SMITH, at the same time as we experience the thickness of materials and the transparency of bodies captured by thermal cameras, we witness a disengagement from binarized realities. In this realm, as related by the likes of Vinciane Despret or Donna Haraway, the invisible slips into the spectrum of the visible: living beings and ghosts, humans and non-humans share a common reality in which care and curiosity are expressed through unexpected kinships–thus a meteorite fragment and a silicon chip capturing ghosts are implanted in the flesh of the artist, whose practising of non-ordinary states of consciousness affords him access to another mode of relations and hybridization with his surroundings.

Amid the multiplicity of types of knowledge that intertwine beyond the limits of their disciplines, to which reality do we wish to belong, without disavowing a constantly renewed openness to difference? Might fiction prove to be closer to what we expect and want from reality? How does resistance to assignment of gender, of norms, influence shared wellness and shared existence? Beyond humans and their dependency on types of knowledge that normalize, perhaps there are gateways leading to a regeneration of wisdom that is more unifying.

This exhibition is made possible thanks to the support of the Institut français in Paris.