This exhibition looks like a philosophical tale, as we wrote in the 18th century.e century. It will evoke both the atmosphere of interstellar travel in Micromegas (1752) by Voltaire, or time travels by The year 2440 (1771) by Louis-Sébastien Mercier or many Memoirs of XXe century (1733) by Samuel Madden…
Julie Tremble’s exhibition presents itself as a symbolic and analytical journey into the immensity of time and space. We will see computer-generated images showing what some have called Coatlicue, a supernova that is believed to be the origin of our solar system. In another video, the artist shows us a reconstruction of the Earth 3.5 billion years ago.
In these works is staged a fascinating scientific problem, that of the passage from the mineral to the living, all being being composed of chemical elements. But in fact, Tremble wonders much more about the stakes of the representation of scientific models, about the way these are linked to the imagination of an era and to philosophical questions. Tremble speaks to us more of an inhabited science, imagined by fiction than of a fiction based on science.
In the spatiotemporal journey of this exhibition, another video entitled Luce RTX3090 will seem to crystallize this statement more particularly. It will allow you to hear a futuristic digital incarnation of the famous actress Luce Guilbault (1935-1991). It is in fact the no less glorious Sylvie Moreau who plays the character that Tremble has Guilbault embody. It must be said that Guilbault herself had already said that if someone were to play her in a role one day, she would like it to be Moreau who did it. This is thus done thanks to a technological tool, an application, which is called Live Link Face and which allows virtual facial “dubbing”.
Luce Guilbault, 127 years old
We are in 2062, and in this video, it is a 127-year-old Luce Guilbault, who speaks to us. In this fiction, she explains that she survived a cancer from which she suffered – and from which she really died at the age of 56. Thanks to modifications of human DNA, she was cured of this disease, and moreover, cancer was completely eradicated from the planet. People “now” receive genetic treatment that keeps them at age 25 for the rest of their lives. Humans can therefore now live very very very old, hundreds of years… But this medical revolution has created a major social crisis. In order to avoid overpopulation of the planet, all these eternal young people must now die at 65. At this age, their body disintegrates, vanishes into the air, becomes invisible… So here is a world “where we have forgotten what the old people look like”, with the exception of Guilbault who refused treatment. allowing you to stay young, accepting your wrinkles and your aging body.
As in many philosophical tales that deal with distant lands or ancient or future times, it is the social satire of the contemporary moment when the work was created that is the real subject of this work. Julie Tremble takes advantage of this to stage our own era, our desire to be 25 for our whole life, the ageism present in our society where we symbolically die once we reach the “third age”, an age when we becomes invisible to the eyes of the world. She also deals with the almost political and revolutionary gesture of proclaiming her age without shame.
Let’s not forget how our times still too often prefer badly lifted stars, like Madonna, Donatella Versace or Mickey Rourke, to those who, like the late VivienneWestwood, embody their age in style. In Tremble’s video, Guilbault explains how, as a feminist and actress, she claimed her aging body in order to “claim her soul” through her body, in order to also be a woman outside of men’s desire. .
Note that on the site of the Dazibao center, we can hear Julie Tremble talking with Christophe Malaterre, philosopher, professor and holder of the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Life Sciences. Aspen speaks, among other things, of the fact that the images of the stars offered to the public by science are never raw, but are always constructed, codified, interpreted.