Pharmakon / Reboot

How does art help us to resonate with ourselves and others? And to take care of those, and everything, around us? These questions, which have underpinned Violaine Lochu's work in recent years, are at the heart of the Pharmakon / Reboot exhibition. In response, the artist poses another question, simple and direct, yet one that opens up worlds, even abysses: what would you like to heal? 
Interested in the interactions between humans and plants, the artist has conducted research in several stages to explore these questions. She met with herbalists, ethnobotanists and magnetisers in Mayenne. She also listened to and collected stories from people in Rennes suffering from various ailments, both before and during the exhibition. It is this collected material that she translates, transposes and recomposes to create new musical and visual compositions. The Pharmakon / Reboot exhibition has a strong ritual dimension, drawing on local and distant indigenous knowledge as much as it fits into the recent history of performance art. The performers will engage in healing rituals at the opening and closing of the exhibition. The art centre's reception and mediation team will also perform regular healing rituals throughout the exhibition, based on wishes submitted by visitors. The artist and the institution are reflecting on, and sharing, new ways of presenting and transmitting art.

With Pharmakon / Reboot, Violaine Lochu lays bare her own voice in order to recompose, to make heard and to accompany our ills. The central questions addressed by the artist in this exhibition prompt others: How can modern and vernacular gestures and knowledge merge and complement each other? How can an exhibition welcome and listen? Can a work of art be both intimate and collective, poetic and political? Pharmakon / Reboot offers a reflection on the decompartmentalisation of forms and practices - artistic, medical, social - made possible by the pooling of knowledge and the (re)invention of healing gestures