It’s finally time to tell the truth. We must denounce all these lies that a conspiratorial intelligentsia pours out on the planet and that the media relays with kindness and interest. Let’s break the silence.
Greta Thunberg is not a real Swedish teenage activist, but an actress paid by the Islamic State group and by George Soros to dishonestly mobilize young people to destabilize the West. This Thunberg character is in fact played by an Australian actress named Estella Renee, a simulator who perfectly knows how to counterfeit the Scandinavian accent. Moreover, Soros is also the puppeteer who pulls the strings of disruptive groups like Antifa or Black Lives Matter, as well as those that led to the electoral fraud of which Trump was the victim… Does all this seem false to you? Who could believe it? But haven’t you too – if only once – fallen into the trap set by fake news?
These are the kinds of discourse that the artist duo Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens are taking up and presenting these days in an exhibition where the part of art is not eclipsed by the political and social commitment called for by their words. . This is a difficult bet, but it is held here.
Arrange the irrational
After an eight-week creation residency organized by the Guido Molinari Foundation, artists Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens are deploying new works in this place, the fruit of the results of their research. This artist duo has often explored the complex relationships between arts and sciences, as well as the tools for representing knowledge. Because, despite what one might think, our knowledge is organized on the basis of intellectual and formal—we could even say spatial—models that shape our relationship to the world. Ibghy and Lemmens insist more this time on the articulation between truth and lie, taking among other things as material the very serious problem of infox, or fake news in English. A work that will bring us back to an observation made since the romantics: it is not reason that dominates the human being, far from it…
In the first part, entitled ” Alternative Facts of the 21st Century » [« Faits alternatifs du 21e siècle »], Ibghy and Lemmens work on the fact that humanity can lie to itself with total confidence. We even grasp the idea that a society can indulge in delirium leading to madness. And let’s not fall into a superficial explanation of this fake news by simply and stupidly pointing the finger at social media. Rumours, hearsay and urban legends are not new. Mass paranoias populate the history of humanity. The “witches” of Salem at the end of the 17th centurye century are proof of that. In The Great Fear from 1789 (1932), historian Georges Lefebvre discusses the chilling stories circulating during the early days of the French Revolution of plots by the ruling class against the people. Already, in 1775, some spoke of a “famine pact” organized by the nobility to make the populations suffer. And we could list a long list of such events…
Ibghy and Lemmens give shape to the impalpable, the elusive of rumor, of urban legend which, despite everything, like black pitch, knows how to conglutinate in a shapeless way with everything that comes into contact with it. , like shit stuck to our soles… For each of these fake news, the duo has created a ceramic sculpture that looks like plasticine. The false news thus takes on a deceptively good-natured appearance.
What the birds talk about
The duo addresses the examples of disinformation that we mentioned at the beginning of the text, but also many others: the dishonest debate on the birthplace of Barack Obama, the Pizzagate which was to reveal a network of pedophiles that the Democrats would have directed in the States United, the fact that the Earth would be flat… And the exhibition goes even further. It actually speaks of the desire for lies of citizens ready to believe, for example, that Putin really wrestled with his bare hands against a bear…
In a second part, on the first floor of the Foundation, Ibghy and Lemmens continue their work on statistics and graphs which give all appearances of the scientific approach to any discourse. In ” What We Know for Sure » [« Ce que nous savons avec certitude »], they show how these graphics are like abstract works that induce a certain reading of the facts. By placing them right next to engravings by Guido Molinari, the works of the master, who died in 2004, they take on a new, sometimes surprising meaning. This is the case of a serigraphy Untitled (1974) by Molinari showing triangular shapes superimposed on each other, a work which is juxtaposed with a collage by Ibghy and Lemmens whose title is Average number of wives of a high-income man.
And to end this very successful exhibition, you must see the video What Birds Talk About When They Talk (2019) presented in the former Foundation vault. This video appropriates bird songs and interprets them in a very free and sometimes very amusing way through subtitles which are presented as a translation. This work deals with our often rich relationships with birds in our myths, stories, films… It must be said that even the tweets on Twitter continue, in a way, this interaction, some of them being written by funny people. crazy birds…
At the end of this visit, the enlightened citizen will certainly wonder how it is possible that so much false information can nowadays find so many pigeons ready to swallow it. Are people not sufficiently informed? Do societies periodically have the will to destroy themselves, among other things by lying?
Do not believe that the victims of this “news” are necessarily less educated or more socially isolated… In the introduction to his book on propaganda, the historian David Colon explains how it can affect all social classes and all education levels. Propaganda, like fake news, would not change people’s opinions, but rather have an opinion-reinforcing effect. So the next time you believe some ridiculous piece of news, you might have to ask yourself how it came to strike a chord with your worldview…