It is the most artistic of containment journals. The French artist Justine Emard, 33 years old this year, is often leaving for Japan or back from the archipelago. She created since March 15 on her Instagram account, followed by many of her Japanese subscribers, a journey by image and object, this fetish that is passionately brought back from her journeys as a symbol of oneself.
His hashtag is clear #stayinyourshell , English speaking like his international career. She illustrates it every day with a different photo, a sort of visual haiku. The counting of the days creates a symbolic and delicate picture book, which refers as much to the cabinet of curiosities in art history as to the daily work of researchers on the trail of new species, new ways, new dreams.
First image of a journey by the symbolic object, the seashell. BALDASSIN Renaud
" I write, confined in my shell ," she tells us from her French refuge. More than the newspaper, it is the idea of counting that drives me: the sum of the days, the fragmentation of the time when everything is suspended to finally create the whole, an introspection on the essentials and a new perspective of creation to the exit ”.
The #dayone of this newspaper presents a large shell, like an offering. The #daytwo transposes this same shell onto a man's arm tinged with blue. The #daythree makes a mask of it in front of his face. The #dayfour holds it like a sea monster. The #dayfive offers it with the back of the hand, like a graceful statue. And, so on, like the stanzas of a poem.
The sound of the Buddhist conch
“The ghost in the shell is a metaphor that I often use to evoke in my work the links between robotics and artificial intelligence, between body and mind. In recent months, the image of the shell itself has appeared repeatedly in my research and finally took on its full meaning a few days ago, ”explains this singular artist.
She was spotted early on by critic Pascal Beausse, head of photographic collections at the National Center for the Plastic Arts (CNAP). Moscow celebrated it in the Biennale orchestrated by Jean-Hubert Martin (he was the general commissioner of the historic exhibition, " The Magicians of the Earth ", at the Pompidou Center in 1989). Paris discovered it in the exhibition “ Fukami ” orchestrated by Yuko Hasegawa, the queen of contemporary art in Japan, at the Hotel Salomon de Rothschild during the summer of 2018.
#stayinyourshell, on the second day. Courtesy Justine Emard
“I created the images of #stayinyourshell from my last meetings, through confined photography to the computer image. Several of them are from 3D scans that I captured last month in Kobe with the monk Eizen Fujiwara. The sound of the Buddhist conch, which is similar to that of the bugle, is blown to banish evil spirits. The 3D scan is a capture of a three-dimensional space-time which allows me to revisit a moment, re-imagine it and make it appear ad infinitum ”.
Man and machine
This lively young woman explores the new relationships that are developing between our lives and technology, imagines dialogues and even dances between man and machine, thanks to artificial intelligence (she was part of Desire: A Revision from the 20th Century to the Digital Age , group exhibition scheduled at the Irish Modern Art Museum in Dublin, until March 22, 2020).
#stayinyourshell, on the fifth day. BALDASSIN Renaud
For the creation of her films and video installations Reborn and Co (AI) xistence , she worked with Mirai Moriyama, magnificent actor and dancer, as well as Alter, a humanoid robot developed by Professors Takashi Ikegami and Hiroshi Ishiguro. Justine Emard presented this video installation in the exhibition “ AI more than human ” at the Barbican Center in the summer of 2019 (now in Groningen in the Netherlands, before The World Museum in Liverpool this summer 2020).
Where does the inspiration for this navigator between pure and imaginary reason come from today? “ I read the chronological poems of Natsume Soseki ( Poems , Le Bruit du Temps editions) after having visited his house last month, transported from Tokyo to the village of preserved architectures from the Meiji era. With the maxim that accompanies them: "Follow nature and leave me". I listen to the sea, in my shell, from confinement to the horizon. What we hear is not a residual memory of the object but an amplification of the sound of life. Old indoor trinkets on our grandparents' shelves prove to us that as long as the sound of the waves resonates, we exist . ”
#stayinyourshell, on the eighth day. Courtesy Justime Emard
His artistic journey is already of an impressive density, with a succession more and more close to personal exhibitions, since 2011, in France, South Korea, Japan, Colombia, Sweden and Italy .. By associating the different mediums from image - from photography to video and virtual reality -, Justine Emard " places her work at the crossroads between robotics, objects, organic life and artificial intelligence ". Its devices take as their starting point deep- learning experiences and deep dialogue between man and machine. Since 2016, it has been collaborating with scientific laboratories in Japan.
She has participated in a number of collective exhibitions: from the International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Moscow to the NRW Forum (Düsseldorf), from the National Museum of Singapore to the City of Arts (Reunion), from the Moscow Museum of Modern Art to the 'Itaú Cultural Institute (São Paulo), from the Cinémathèque Québécoise (Montreal) to the Barbican Center (London), from the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin) to Frac Franche-Comté (France). On the program for this spring stopped by the coronavirus, Future and the Arts ”, group exhibition, at the Mori Art Museum Tokyo until March 29, 2020; and "Human Learning" , collective exhibition at the Canadian Cultural Center in Paris, until April 17, 2020.
Exoposition in Japan of the video Co (AI) xistence , for which she worked with Mirai Moriyama, actor and dancer, as well as Alter, a humanoid robot developed by professors Takashi Ikegami and Hiroshi Ishiguro. Courtesy Justime Emard
