Hecceites
Digital exploration and deployment project, in collaboration with Regart art centre, Lévis, boadcast on the center’s website, November 2022 to November 2024
“Far from inhabiting a closed floor furnished with various objects, animals live and breathe in a world of earth and sky – or earth and sky in the making – where to perceive is to tune one’s movements in counterpoint to the modulations of day and night, of light and sun, of wind and climate. It is to feel the currents of air as they penetrate the body and the textures of the earth beneath your feet. In the open world, to leave the last word to Deleuze, “there is no line separating heaven and earth; there is no intervening distance, no perspective or contour, visibility is limited; and yet there is an extraordinarily fine topology, based not on points and objects but on heccoeities, on sets of relations (winds, ripples of snow or sand, song of sand or crack of ice, tactile qualities of both)”. These heccoeities are not what we perceive, since there is no object to perceive in the world of fluid space. Rather, they are what we perceive with. In sum, to perceive the environment is not to look for the things we might find in it, nor to recognize their solidified forms, but to participate with them in the material flows and movements that contribute to their – and our – formation. Tim Ingold. Walking with Dragons, 2013. (loose translation)
The supernatural landscapes that emerge from the radiographic treatment applied to video excerpts taken in a fixed shot on the place where I live and another one nearby, invite us to enter the imaginary of a nature in the making. From my first glance at the scattering of poplar cotton, the pollinators attracted by the blossoming of a lime tree, as well as the waterfalls of a river I often visit, issues related to human-nature emerge, such as the great loss of biomass and biodiversity, as well as the accelerated melting of glaciers, as if the subtle had suddenly become visible.
This project is part of the Décroissance program at Regart art centre. It was produced as part of the Exploration et déploiement numérique program of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
