<div><p>At the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the transdisciplinary exhibition ‘Les Portes du possible’ explores the complex and fascinating relationship between art and science fiction</p></div><p><strong></strong></p>

Ingrid Luquet-Gad

Can imagining another tomorrow make it possible?

<p>We should leave. But where to? We would like to leave. But how? Alexandra Müller, a curator at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, is unambiguous: ‘Sometimes, the ability to imagine a different future is enough to make it possible.’ And thus, we understand: to escape one mental planet for another, in spite of everything, is not an illusory project at all. It is precisely because horizons seem obstructed that we must attend to them. And in this, art can help.</p><p>Bringing together 200 works from the late 1960s to today, the exhibition ‘Les Portes du possible. Art &amp; science-fiction’&nbsp;[A Gateway to Possible Worlds. Art &amp; science-fiction]&nbsp;(November 5, 2022&nbsp;–&nbsp;10 April 2023) creates an immersive experience within the museum’s 2300 m<sup style="background-color: initial;">2</sup> space. The result is a grand exploratory experience devoted to the relationship between art and science fiction; a way of awakening desires for the beyond, to let a thousand sensory alternatives take seed. Müller, the exhibition’s curator explains: ‘I do not think of science fiction as a genre, but as a method of thinking – of taking nothing for granted and affirming that we are not condemned to perpetuate the status quo.’</p>

<p>The transdisciplinary exhibition weaves together art and literature, with insurgent imaginations at its beating heart. Its title, ‘Les Portes du possible’ [A Gateway to Possible Worlds], is a challenge to all living beings here in the present: to cast off the ambient paralysis and become light once more. ‘I had the 2005 comic of the same name, [<em>Les Portes du Possible, 2005</em>] by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters in my library,’ says Müller. ‘At once poetic and symbolic, the title implicitly designates the imagination as a tool for possible change. It opens our horizons. But, since the end of the modern era, we have lost our enthusiasm for desirable futures. Now, we instead tend to discredit any utopian endeavor as naïve.’</p><p>Speculative fictions may well be in vogue, but dystopia is the preferred genre of the moment. Testifying to this zeitgeist, the neologism <em>collapsologie</em> entered French dictionaries in 2020. This current of transdisciplinary study examines the collapse of thermo-industrial civilization (that is, ours) as it is caught in extractivist and ecocidal systems. At the edge of the abyss, the spontaneous reflex would be to accept the inescapable, to turn the situation into caricature so that dread can be transformed into thrill – to anticipate the fall by attempting to find pleasure in the vertigo. How, then, to overcome these paralyzing imaginations in favor of 21<sup>st</sup>-century utopias, or in the words of art historian Amelia Barikin, a ‘fabrication of worlds?’</p>

<p>Some artists are already at work on this. During the 2010s, attempts to outmaneuver apocalyptic imaginings led many to take non-human worlds as their subject. Reflecting the writings of Ursula K. Le Guin or Donna Haraway, these artists work to generate non-human biotopes that develop in autonomous temporalities. Ian Cheng’s pioneering series <em>Emissaries </em>(2015–17), which simulated animal, vegetal, and mineral biotopes with lives of their own, finds responses today in the parallel worlds of Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Jenna Sutela, and Alice Bucknell. By employing new technologies such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and deep learning, they give life to non-human ecosystems that would persist on a planet where humans are no more.</p><p>At first glance, science fiction would seem to be in line with this planned extinction – at least, the kind of science fiction that puts the emphasis on the science rather than on the fiction. This variety is so wrapped up in its belief in technology and progress that it has trapped itself in testosterone-filled fantasies of space conquest. Müller is aware of this: ‘The genre has long suffered from an old attribution that it has had difficulty ridding itself of. But who reads and writes science fiction today? Those on the margins, those who are unsatisfied with the status quo. A huge number of these people are associated with the LGBTQIA+ community, are afrodescendant, or are political or ecological activists.’</p>

<p>In Metz, the classics of literary science fiction nevertheless supply the exhibition itinerary with its five thematic entry points: <em>Brave New World</em> (1931) by Aldous Huxley, <em>Neuromancer </em>(1984) by William Gibson, <em>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? </em>(1968) by Philip K. Dick, <em>Soylent Green</em> (1966) by Harry Harrison, and <em>Parable of the Sower</em> (1993) by Octavia E. Butler. These visions of the future elaborated in other times remain valid, so long as they are repopulated by other alliances, voices, and visions. The artist list for the exhibition reflects this: leading lights such as Tetsumi Kudo and Peter Hutchinson are present alongside representatives of a younger generation of artists including Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Max Hooper Schneider, Renaud Jerez, Josh Kline, Josèfa Ntjam, Aïcha Snoussi, and Anna Uddenberg.</p><p>‘This generation has been pursuing an approach steeped in science fiction for several years, despite the fact that exhibitions rarely feature the term in their communications,’ says Müller. Among major events, one would have to go back to the ‘Science-Fiction’ exhibition series organized by the curator Harald Szeemann at the Kunsthalle in Bern, which traveled to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf between fall 1967 and spring 1968. Still, though, that exhibition was more concerned with the historical imaginings inherited by the society of the 1960s, including in its approach to a whole host of artifacts, counting giant robots and NASA visuals among them.</p>

<p>But the 1960s marked a turning point. In the midst of the decade that bore witness to the rise of the feminist and environmentalist movements, science fiction began to shed the flying saucers and aliens. It moved closer to reality and began to speculate about worlds contiguous to the present – a turn studied in the book of reference <em style="background-color: initial;">Art et science-fiction. La Ballard Connection</em> (2011) edited by art historian Valérie Mavridorakis, and extended by the anthology <em style="background-color: initial;">Science Fiction</em> (2020) edited by Dan Byrne-Smith and devoted to artistic and theoretical works produced in the 21<sup style="background-color: initial;">st</sup> Century.</p><p>Far from a realism doped up on glittering technological escapism or cataclysmic imaginations of a planned disconnection, the possible worlds that stir today’s artists are connected more to the social. And just as afrofuturism, cyberfeminism, and cyberpunk draw from 1960s counterculture to sweep aside the history written by the winners, their legacy, more vivid than ever, has expanded. We must now also consider the additions of ‘Sinofuturism’, advanced by artists like Lawrence Lek, Lu Yang, and Sin Wai Kin, and ‘Gulf Futurism’, theorized in 2011 by the artists Fatima Al Qadiri and Sofia Al Maria.</p>

<p>In these two recent branches of social science fiction narratives, the globalized and necessarily digital contemporary aesthetic carries with it a mode of direct action: to build otherwise, by and for other subjects, but within our present. Here and now, without further delay. Because there is no planet B, the conquest will be that of alternatives. With or without science, but through fiction is sure.</p><hr /><p>Ingrid Luquet-Gad is an art critic and PhD candidate based in Paris. She is the arts editor of <em>Les Inrockuptibles</em>, a contributing editor at <em>Spike art magazine</em>, and a journalist for <em>Flash Art</em>.</p><p>‘Les Portes du possible. Art &amp; science-fiction’<br />Centre Pompidou-Metz<br />November 5, 2022 – April 10, 2023</p><p>Captions for full-bleed images:<br />Aïda Muluneh, <em>The Shackles of Limitations</em>, 2018 (from series&nbsp;‘Water Life Series’).&nbsp;Commissioned&nbsp;by&nbsp;WaterAid with support of the H&amp;M Fondation. Courtesy of the&nbsp;artist and&nbsp;WaterAid.&nbsp;&copy; Aïda Muluneh<br />Edgar Arcenaux, <em>Detroit Monolith, It’s Full of Holes</em>, 2011.&nbsp;Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne&nbsp;&copy; Edgar Arceneaux. Photograph by&nbsp;Robert Wedemeyer.<br />GERIKO (Hélène Jeudy &amp; Antoine Caëcke), <em style="background-color: initial;">Sur Anvil</em>, 2015, from the album&nbsp;‘Vessel’&nbsp;de Lorn, label Wednesday Sound. Clip vidéo, noir et blanc, sonore, 3’41’’. Courtesy of the artists.</p><p>English translation: Jacob Bromberg</p>

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At the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the transdisciplinary exhibition ‘Les Portes du possible’ explores the complex and fascinating relationship between art and science fiction

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