Avaler les cyclones

With Avaler les cyclones, Evariste Richer offers La Criée a sensorial experience that unfolds in every dimension of the art centre’s space. Composed of works specially conceived for the occasion, the exhibition is an invitation to think about the ramified links between heaven and earth, history and myth, meteorology and the imaginary.

Avaler les cyclones is a landscape in which we drift between rainbow mountains, under a great fluorescent sun, along the borders of thunderstruck continents, caught up in the random turmoil of a sky composed of shades of grey.

Avaler les cyclones is a pseudomorphism¹ in which a circle becomes infinity, 75,000 faces of playing dice reveal the appearance of a hurricane and two helicopter blades become the hands of a ghost clock.

Avaler les cyclones is a concatenation² where the different works combine and wrap themselves into a spiral.

Avaler les cyclones is a climate that oscillates between disruption, lightning strike and bedazzlement.

In Avaler les cyclones the human hand – that which holds the conductor’s baton, the architect’s pencil, but also the blind man’s cane or the dice of chance – is always present. Through these suspended gestures and various operations, it attempts to reappropriate the experience of long time³. The exhibition questions man’s place on earth, his power of invention and his demiurgic excess.

Avaler les cyclones is an oxymoron: it speaks of suspension and acceleration, anxiety and wonder, movement and petrification.

Avaler les cyclones is a vertiginous experience that takes the form of a twilight haiku: human beings in the setting sun, spiralling out of control, the die is cast.

With Avaler les cyclones Evariste Richer employs slow, intense, almost geological thought. This reflection crystallises in works that suspend, rush and interact to express the density and stratification of time as much as the irreducible intensity of the present.

The exhibition is therefore a place where human, geological and cosmological history intertwine. In this respect, it is in keeping with the words of historian Achille Mbembe: “[…] in dealing with the Earth, it is a symbiotic chain, in reality the extent of living beings and their innumerable manifestations, that we must keep in mind. Humans, animal, plant and mineral species, microbes, winds, tornadoes, hurricanes, bacteria and viruses, as well as the seas, skies, climate, technological systems and other artificial devices and externalities, are all inseparably part of it. And what about the soils and glaciers, the rocky mix deposited by the rivers, the striated hills, the clay, the stone and the statues?”⁴

translation: Ken Peat

1 – Phenomenon by which a mineral has the appearance of another mineral.

2 – A series of terms, ideas, facts linked by causality.

3 – “One day, the space-time of the world will cease to exist because we will have lost the extension and duration of the world because of speed. Not only will we have saved time in getting from one point to another, but above all we will have lost the space-time of the world, because it will have become too small for the new technologies. There is a considerable symbolic loss here.”, Conversation between Paul Virilio and Giairo Daghini, Dromologie : logique de la course, in Multitudes – futur antérieur 5 – printemps 91

4 – Achille Mbembe, La communauté terrestre, La Découverte, Paris, 2023, p. 17.