We are volcanoes

On the curvature of their closed eyes, a dreamer’s mental images appear as enigmatic twitches. For the onlooker, these movements express potential stories, without ever being made explicit during the diurnal register: the register of the capture, the accomplished form, or the diachronic narration. The image refers to our contemporary condition. We live in a world that has once again become both opaque and uncertain, and we know that our knowledge is partial, our taxonomies outdated, our belief systems relative. And yet, the human animal cannot cease to want to make sense of it: so here it goes, diving back into feeling and perception, illuminating itself in the flickering light of heritage and speculation mingled in a single beam. Loucia Carlier belongs to the generation that has the task of overcoming both the certainties of modern artists and the nihilism of post-modern artists. On the surface of her wall paintings and through her sculptural volumes, a network of archetypal images, domestic elements and fragments of sentences swells and works from within. These pieces are of troubled materiality. They exhibit their scarred, atopic skin (skai, newspaper or wallpaper) and their blistered, uncertain foundations (polystyrene, plaster, expanding foam or ceramics) while showing a desire to organise. They protrude, attempt to stand vertical while piercing themselves with skylights and fences, or else providing seats and rest areas for a post-humanity in the process of being reorganised. By titling her exhibition We are volcanoes, echoing a lecture given by feminist science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin at Bryn Mawr College (Pennsylvania, USA) in 1986, Loucia Carlier is in tune with the deconstruction of the idioms of Western-centric power while opening up the possibility of a subjective, relative and resilient cosmology. In the manner of lava which, gushing forth from a molten heart, indiscriminately reshapes every element in its path, the artist infuses the places of her intervention with an alchemical life. In its wake, this new life embraces the infinitely small and the infinitely large (bacteriological strains and cosmic soup), taking in the organised life that struggles there (witches and beetles) as well as its frail shelters (offices and ships). As of now, everything remains in a state of possibility, in a permanent state of reorganization, proceeding by fragments, juxtapositions and agglomerations. In this, Loucia Carlier proposes a sensitive exploration in line with the work of the theoretician Eugene Thacker. In his book In the Dust of This Planet (2011), Thacker combines philosophy, science fiction, media theory and occultism to inhabit the “nebulous zone” of the “world-without-us,” this interstitial space situated at the edge of the anthropocentric “world-for-us” and the objective “world-in-itself.”