To Face

Paris Art Lab, Paris, September 2020

To Face was born out of the image of the fishing net brought by the wave to the shoreline. New Relation thought of the marine waste as a revenant. At first in the depths of the water as if it had been pushed back, it becomes, once brought back by the wave, the reflection of our Western way of life. It leads us to face the result of our way of producing, and to question the traditional distinction between natural history and human history. It is from this metaphor of the sea, from the idea of ‘to face’, from the image of the repressed that reappears, that New Relation has created the Ghost Bag.

Made from recycled materials, the bag itself is recyclable. For this purpose, New Relation has developed a fabric consisting of the assembly of fishing nets recovered from the sea (waste from intensive fishing tools), trapped in regenerated Econyl nylon.

For the duration of an exhibition we have extended this thought that surrounds and permeates the bag by staging it. It presents a device designed to psychoanalyze the bag as a conscious subject. The bag, in the center of the room, is placed on a couch and faces a chair. We hear fragments of interviews mixed with the recomposed sound of an ocean: these are the voices of researchers questioning a relationship with the off-centered environment.
The edition, carrying the same title as the exhibition, collects and unfolds the series of interviews heard in fragments at the exhibition.

The common horizon of these exchanges is the need to take stock of the omnipresent trace of the human being on earth, and to think of new relationships and ways of being to what is said to be “natural”. We believe that the words of researchers make it possible “to face” in a double sense: to face the reality of the anthropocene world, and to stand up to imagine new solutions. To Face is thus presented as a series of interviews in a form close to discussion, mingling geography, epistemology, anthropology, language sciences and environmental psychology.

Interviews with: Alix Cosquer (Researcher in Environmental Psychology) – Loïc Fel (Philosopher) – Aurélia Gualdo (PhD student in Anthropology) – Géraldine Le Roux (Ethnologist) – Michel Lussault (Philosopher) – Stéphanie Posthumus (Specialist in ecocriticism)

Editorial direction and interview production: Leonore Larrera and Alexandre Parodi
Graphic design: Alice Villiers

TO FACE MAGAZINE - NEW RELATION - FRANCAIS

TO FACE MAGAZINE - NEW RELATION - ENGLISH