Hoël DuretLow

Hoël Duret’s artistic practice combines fictitious stories with real events and develops a visual language drawing on science fiction, post-apocalyptic cinema and the utopias of modernism, with whose help it addresses the relationships between nature and technology against the background of advancing digitalisation. The installation in the entrance hall of the Villa Merkel presents a quotation of jungle embedded in a network of cables. This appears to draw the proliferating vegetal-technological organism into an exchange of information – as if human beings were incapable of anything other than controlling everything at all times, the growth of plants included. Hoël Duret steers his artificial ecosystem by means of an algorithm based on climate data published online. In real time, these choreograph the lighting, the misting and the soundtrack of the installation. Scientifically measurable parameters of current climate change are thus drawn into a spatial ensemble oscillating between Romanticism and science fiction. This lends the installation a looming, latently apocalyptic undertone and at the same time speaks to our deep-seated longing for Arcadia.

Exhibition:
Villa Merkel Galerie der Stadt Esslingen, 16/8–15/11/2020