Virgile Novarina

Designed to exist in weightlessness by artist Eduardo Kac and created aboard the International Space Station by French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, the artwork Inner Telescope marks the first step toward a new form of artistic and poetic creation, freed from the constraints of gravity. The film Inner Telescope, a space artwork by Eduardo Kac, takes us on this artistic and scientific journey—from the conception of the piece in Eduardo Kac’s studio in Chicago to its realization in orbit by Thomas Pesquet, 400 km above Earth, during the European Space Agency’s Proxima mission.

Since his two attacks with a hammer against Marcel Duchamp's urinal in 1993 and again in 2006, the artist Pierre Pinoncelli is known worldwide for this iconoclastic and subversive act. Often misinterpreted by the press, this double performance, and the trials that followed it, overshadowed the rest of his work: his paintings from the 1960s, and the many powerful happenings he made. Pinoncelli sprayed André Malraux with red paint in 1969, robbed a bank to protest apartheid in 1975, and mutilated himself in 2002 to denounce FARC violence in Colombia. Often motivated by political demands, Pinoncelli went to the end of his ideas and expressed himself through often shocking gestures, which question us.

The philosophical notion of "self," which first appeared more than four hundred years ago in John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, has been somewhat challenged in recent years by a series of scientific discoveries about the role of bacteria inside the human body and the functioning of our immune system. In addition to the trillion cells that make up the human body, there are ten to a hundred times more bacterial cells living on its mucous membranes, performing essential functions for the individual. So, what could an artistic self-portrait look like if it took into account this entire set of bacterial cells, known as the microbiota? This is the journey that ORLAN and Mael le Mée embarked on during the participatory performance TANGIBLE STRIPTEASE (in nano-sequences), which took place on June 2, 2016, at the Bains Numériques festival in Enghien-les-Bains and on September 16 at the Festival Vivant in Paris.