AUGMENTED BODIES / ARTOCENE

From June 28 to September 14, 2025, on the iconic site of Saint-Gervais Mont-Blanc, the contemporary art biennial Artocène presents its 4th edition. Entitled Augmented Bodies, this edition brings together twelve artists exploring the evolution of the body (or bodies) through science and technology. Augmented Bodies offers a reflection on how organisms evolve or adapt to their environment, whether through natural processes (evolutionary biology) or via science and technology. Since its beginnings, humankind has enhanced its capabilities through tools. The mechanical tool was followed by the digital tool, virtually extending or amplifying human faculties. The recent emergence of connected tools and artificial intelligence marks a new era, fundamentally altering how humans relate to their environment. Exploring the relationship between bodies and landscape, Augmented Bodies takes the Alpine landscape and the practice of mountaineering as the starting point for its curatorial approach. The Mont Blanc Massif, an extreme natural environment, has been transformed fi rst by technology (sporting equipment, cable cars, climate change), and more recently by digital tools (GPS, data...). It can be seen as emblematic of the emergence of new relationships with the body. Caught amid these fast and radical changes, other species also adapt—often through hybridization. The animal and plant kingdoms become a repertoire of evolutionary scenarios, offering inspiration for homo sapiens. Will the development of human technique and technology require a return to nature and the living world? Might humans be called upon to integrate the long rhythms of the landscape into their own bodies? Amandine Guruceaga Hard Shell-Soft Skin To create her group of sculptures displayed in the Fayet train station, Amandine Guruceaga drew inspiration from contemporary iconography of the mountains. It was only at the end of the 19th century that modernity began to infiltrate the once-wild world of high mountains. Metal structures, such as pylons and ski lifts, and shelters gradually appeared. Then, within this mineral landscape—pure and dominated by shades of brown, grey, green, and white—colorful textiles, bright ropes, and a profusion of technical equipment in fluorescent tones emerged. The artist thus imagined soft, brightly colored forms, which she suspended from the roof structure of the station hall. Her soft sculptures recall the silhouettes seen from afar on ridgelines—balanced, hanging at the end of a rope, or carried through the air by a fabric. Bodies in motion, reduced to their abstract qualities, traversing the space vertically with the help of climbing ropes, paragliding wings, and climbers' carabiners. Drawing on this repertoire of gestures and equipment, Amandine Guruceaga offers a reflection on the evolution of the human body through tools. Initially rudimentary—a flint, a hammer—these tools have grown increasingly sophisticated, allowing humans to enhance their abilities and travel ever farther, ever faster. Rebecca Allen, Cécile B. Evans, Loucia Carlier Human After All? In his essay L’Homme augmenté*, psychiatrist Raphaël Gaillard describes a tipping point in the history of our civilization. According to him, connected tools represent a turning point as significant as the invention of writing around 3300 BCE. Writing, for the first time, made it possible to preserve knowledge and transmit it other than orally, profoundly transforming our relationship to the world, our way of thinking, and even the structure of our brain. Today, we are experiencing a comparable shift. Our connected tools - smartphones, health assistants, cloud services, etc. - are constant companions in our daily lives. They tell us how to sleep better, how to move around, and how to optimize our well-being. A large portion of our species is constantly assisted, to the point where some cognitive functions no longer seem to need stimulation. It is within this context that Rebecca Allen’s work unfolds. As early as in the late 1970s, she was part of a research group called Architecture Machine Group, the predecessor of MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the first artificial intelligences and virtual reality models were beginning to take shape. She became one of the pioneers in envisioning the movement of the human body within virtual environments, beyond the physical world. Her three historical videos presented at Artocène were all created at the Computer Graphic Lab in NY in the early 1980s. In her works, Allen depicts three-dimensional bodies in perpetual motion within digital space. In the Swimmer video (1981) one of the first examples of computer animation of human motion, appears the first 3D female computer model, which we find in the other two works of the exhibition. In a distant echo of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, Woman Ascending presents a nude female body in progression: a figure freed from its environment and constraints, continuously ascending. In Steps (1982), a work inspired by the Bauhaus Theatre, the digital bodies imagined by the artist dance, transform into geometric volumes and abstractions, and continue their endless motion. Created in collaboration with composer Carter Burwell, this fusion of music, movement, and digital art marks a major breakthrough: a new - virtual - reality begins to alter our perception of the world. The body can now travel without physically moving. The immersive and sensory installation What the Heart Wants is layered with popular, scientific, and historical lore embedded in both real and imagined landscapes. It is infused with the research Cécile B. Evans conducted in 2014 within the Affective Computing Group at The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, on the evolution of emotions in the age of information and digital technology. The visitor enters a water-filled installation that changes the atmosphere and grounds the visitor as they are guided along a white platform to the video. Set in a speculative future, the narrative follows HYPER, a hyperintelligence, and those within her world: an immortal cell, a memory from 1972, a trio of vanished lovers, robotic caregivers with lab-born children, and a collective of listening ears.

 Using the theme of the "black box" — a term first used in psychology to describe the human mind and its mysterious workings, and more recently applied to the reflective capacities of artificial intelligence — Cécile B. Evans explores the possibility of what it could mean to be human in the future and who, if anyone, might even want to be human. The exhibition also features four works by Loucia Carlier, combining bas-relief, screen printing, and model-making. These could be fragments of future environments, situated between the pursuit of well-being and the omnipresence of technology. Fantastical and subterranean, they seem to emerge from dreams - or nightmares. Indeed, upon closer inspection of these miniature settings, from which human figures are entirely absent, the pursuit of personal development and the virtual bubble created by new technologies begin to appear almost threatening, as if they risk isolating and disembodying those who engage in them. Loucia Carlier’s hybrid, dystopian sculptures thus serve, in negative, as invitations to connect - not digitally, but with others - and not to retreat into our individual bodies, but to form a collective body, to cultivate a sense of togetherness. *Augmented human Nefeli Papadimoulir The calm that keeps us awake Nefeli Papadimouli first studied architecture before turning to fine arts. Her work explores how the human body occupies space, particularly through textile sculptures and performances. Entitled The calm that keeps us awake, the pieces presented by the artist in the Châtelet station hall, was born from an observation made during her residency in Saint-Gervais in October 2024. While walking through the summer pastures, Nefeli Papadimouli was struck by the sound of the bells around the necks of sheep. The bell then appeared to her as a new way to extend the body into space. She thus designed a loose costume, made of large panels of black and white fabric and covered with 10,000 small bells. Activated through performance, this sculptural and sonic garment relies on the subtlety of movement. The performer, their face concealed, triggers vibrations by making delicate and mysterious gestures, somewhere between dance and an unknown ritual. The costume acts here as a protective armour, which—by resonating, by producing sound waves—reveals its surroundings. Through this work, Nefeli Papadimouli also investigates the symbolic dimension of the bell, sometimes considered a healing or purifying object. The sonic vibrations dissolve the boundaries between inner and outer worlds, between body and environment. By blending medieval and rural aesthetics, craftsmanship and technology, the artist succeeds in creating a delicate and immersive work that seems to question—and perhaps attempt to heal—our connection with nature. Hugo Servanin Environnement 11 Hugo Servanin’s practice is inhabited by hybrid versions of the body, made by casts perceived as relics and prosthetics, and reminiscent of medical imagery and somehow an archaeology of the future. For his project at Pile Pont, the artist draws a parallel between the stratification of landscape and the notion of augmented body—between the excavation of millennia-old human remains and experiments in cryopreservation. Using steel beams and a multitude of plaster casts of natural elements and human body parts, created and reworked in the studio, he constructs a kind of fictional archaeology, a topography of deep time. The artist explores the notion of "terraforming": the transformation by the human species of a celestial body into a habitable space—an extreme shaping of nature, imagined even from an extraterrestrial perspective, by and for human beings. Beyond the accumulation of limbs on the ground, large “tables” stand out, evoking archaeological research or strange cryogenic procedures. Each of these elements seems to stage human remains under examination, or bodies being repaired or treated. Yet each table is also unique, presenting its own environment: one shows a mutating, cryogenized body, overtaken by ice growths; another reveals an organism extracted from the bowels of the Earth after a long period of burial. From one table-image to the next, through a play on contours and their dissolution, Hugo Servanin reveals the life cycle of the human being—the evolution of the body from growth to its eventual disintegration and return to nature. Though it is impossible to determine the time period in which the scene takes place, and the diversity of overlapping cycles prevents any linear chronology, time is nevertheless present—materialized by a swinging light moving through space like a pendulum, governing the entire installation. By positioning himself as a “composer” or “assembler,” Hugo Servanin frees himself from the shadowy figures of Faust or Frankenstein. Rejecting the role of demiurge in favour of that of a stage director paradoxically grants him the freedom to explore every possible scenario: he modifies, augments, and hybridizes organisms, ultimately sketching a form capable of achieving potential symbiosis with nature. In doing so, he regenerates the myth of Pygmalion: his creature would need not a breath of life to reach aesthetic perfection, but to attain biological harmony—a new ideal. Oliver Laric Gypaète barbu For Artocène, Oliver Laric created a mobile sculpture installed on the Bettex – Mont d’Arbois cable car line. The Austrian artist’s practice is characterized by a dialogue between the history of sculpture, the transformation of forms and shifts in technologies (the internet, 3D scanning and printing, etc.). Since 2007, Laric has been associated with the "post-internet" movement, addressing the reproduction and dissemination of images. He has made digital versions of some of his works freely accessible, allowing others to download, modify, and evolve them. This approach seeks to break down physical and legal boundaries and enable culture to circulate freely. For this mobile sculpture, the artist began his research around the figure of a bearded vulture (Gypaetus barbatus). During his stay in Saint-Gervais last October, Laric discovered that this bird - which had left a strong impression on him as a child during visits to a zoo in Innsbruck, Austria - was historically native to the region. Though it was extinct from the Mont Blanc massif nearly a century ago, the bearded vulture was reintroduced to the Haute-Savoie area about ten years ago through an exchange with the Alpine Zoo of Innsbruck. A fascinating creature - an intrepid traveler, capable of using tools, a source of inspiration for Jules Verne, and long believed responsible for the death of Aeschylus - it is also a threatened species, now seen as a symbol of the fragile balance between humans and non human animals. The bearded vulture is an unlikely mascot and perhaps more commonly associated with villainous roles. Laric designed a fragmented sculpture of a bearded vulture, constructed using a similar language of engineering as the cable cars mechanics. Through this subtle interplay of emptiness and fullness, stillness and motion, nature and technology, the artist engages with entanglements and moments of hybridity. Panos Profitis With the stones behind us In his practice, Panos Profitis intertwines the legacy of Hellenistic culture with an aesthetic drawn from the industrial world. The ideal of the classical Greek body is often confronted with aluminum - a material associated with technological progress and mechanical tools. For this installation at Mont d’Arbois, the artist draws from the history and telluric energy of Mount Parnassus, where he grew up. Inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and specifically the myth of Pyrrha and Deucalion, the work revisits an ancient narrative of survival and rebirth. Echoing the later Biblical story of Noah, the myth tells of a flood that erases humanity, leaving two survivors who, as the waters recede, cast stones behind them, from which new human forms emerge. This myth becomes a lens through which the work reflects on ecological themes and extreme weather phenomena, while allegorically addressing the origins of humanity and our deep connection to the earth. The transformation of stone into body echoes a recurring sculptural motif: the passage from inert matter to living form. At the center of the installation stands a monumental, stylized figure, an athletic metal silhouette, headless and armless, placed in front of a rocky backdrop like a theatrical set. In this composition, bauxite and aluminum coexist, embodying their transformation from raw mineral to refined metal. Their union suggests a shared material ancestry, a lineage from geology to technology. Here, the human body, despite its apparent solidity, functions like a mask, temporarily veiling the force of the surrounding mountain landscape. As the viewer moves, the sculpture reveals shifting layers and multiple interpretations, reminiscent of the visual illusions of ancient theater. Mont d’Arbois becomes a stage where myth is reimagined, and where materials from another mountain, soil, stone, matter “migrate” to form a new symbolic geography. Through this gesture, inorganic elements from a distant yet kindred landscape merge into a transformed scenography, a world in flux. Yan Tomaszewski Herz aus Glas For his installation at La Cure, Yan Tomaszewski envisions a new ecosystem, halfway between science fiction and an imagined future. Using stoneware, blown glass, and minerals collected from the banks of the Bon Nant—the stream running through Saint-Gervais—the artist creates a unique and threatening creature that seems to emerge from a mineral desert. It could represent a transitional stage in the mutation of human, animal, or plant forms: we might be witnessing the appearance of a hybrid being, born of a forced adaptation to a radically altered environment. By showing the richness and complexity of species evolving to acclimate and survive environmental changes, Yan Tomaszewski’s sculptural installation subtly reveals the impermanence of the universe and everything within it. At La Cure, the artist also questions the limits of modern medicine. He presents glass pieces representing internal organs—possibly human—mounted on metal rods that evoke a scientific laboratory. Isolated from their systems, these organs can no longer fulfill their life-sustaining functions. Removed from their environment, no longer made of flesh but crystallized, they appear devoid of life and meaning, as if waiting for a new form of activation. Finally, with the video Gangnam Beauty, Yan Tomaszewski addresses issues of personal self-determination, facial cosmetic surgery, and the standardization of physical appearances through popular culture. He questions whether, in the society of spectacle in which we live, a person can still inhabit a body that does not conform to prevailing standards without being excluded—or whether, by conforming, we ourselves feed the monster. Camille Henrot Psychopompe Psychopompe (2011) is an experimental film by Camille Henrot that revisits the Promethean myth through the lens of Mary Shelley's most famous novel. Entitled Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, the novel is set in the dramatic landscapes of the Mont Blanc region, where Mary Shelley spent the summer of 1816 with the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. The year before had seen one of the most violent volcanic eruptions in history, in Indonesia. Since then, the sky remained veiled, and temperatures were abnormally low. The year 1816 came to be known as "the year without a summer. » It was in this eerie, almost apocalyptic atmosphere that Mary Shelley, following a nightmare, began writing her novel. The tragic fate of Prometheus—the Titan who defied Zeus and the gods by giving fire to humankind—served as her starting point. She imagined the story of Victor Frankenstein, a scientist obsessed with knowledge and discovery, who creates a monstrous being from parts of human and animal corpses, giving it the appearance of a man. Two centuries later, when Camille Henrot made her film, the themes of the novel were more relevant than ever. Advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and biotechnology have reignited debates about what it means to be human. In Ancient Greek, psychopomp refers to a guide of souls to the afterlife. Camille Henrot's film features images of muscular climbers interwoven with visuals from a wide variety of sources and eras: encyclopedias, classical statuary, natural and medical iconography, clips from different cinematic adaptations of Frankenstein, found footage, and more. These are interspersed with quotes from Mary Shelley's novel and accompanied by a haunting soundtrack. This profusion of sound, imagery, and information quickly becomes dizzying—even unsettling. A worthy successor to Mary Shelley, Camille Henrot offers not a moralizing work but one that is complex and rhizomatic, open to multiple interpretations. Some may see it as a parallel between the athlete and the monster, a meditation on the animal side of humanity, or a reflection on the fate of all creation, which seems always to emancipate itself from its creator and develop an autonomous, organic existence. Giulia Cenci ombre bianche During her first visit to the Bellevue site, Giulia Cenci was struck not only by the vastness of the landscape, but also by the uniqueness of the place, where tourism coexists with pastoral activity. Moved by the presence of the emblematic Hérens cows, she envisioned a series of fountain-sculptures designed especially for them: hybrid forms that would provide fresh spring water throughout the summer. Caring for animals also means caring for humans — particularly in these mountains where the livelihoods of people and livestock are deeply interconnected. An ancient tale tells the story of a shepherd, a resident of Mont Joly, who fell in love with a mountain. Unable to unite his fate with that of his mineral beloved, the shepherd, overwhelmed by grief, wept endlessly. From his tears were born the glaciers of Bionnassay and Tré-la-Tête. This legend, in which emotions are said to shape the landscape, holds particular resonance at the Bellevue site, from where the majestic Bionnassay glacier can be seen, nourishing the waterways below. The tear here becomes the link between the living and the land. It embodies human fragility in the face of natural forces, which it also nourishes. Today, it is the glaciers themselves that, through their excessive melting, seem to weep — filling streams, rivers, and oceans, irrigating the earth, and sustaining life. Giulia Cenci’s three fountain-sculptures intertwine human faces, fragments of animal bodies, plant elements, as well as mechanical parts. This fusion of nature and technology, of organism and object, gives rise to strange, hybrid forms. Suggestive of future fossils, with a hint of the morbid and the monstrous, these new shapes evoke the mutability of species — the inventiveness of living beings in their constant reinvention. More than mere vessels, Giulia Cenci’s works emerge as true matrices, generating life and its boundless creativity. Zhang Yunyao Studies in Figues From a young age in China, Zhang Yunyao artistic enlightenment began with traditional Chinese calligraphy. He devoted all his free time to it, perfecting his stroke until he reached an exceptional level of mastery. This attention to line, precision, and detail continues to inform his entire body of work. Over time, Yunyao developed a deep interest in Western art history, incorporating into his practice the aesthetic of the human form as represented in classical sculpture. He explores the idealized body - dynamic yet static - sometimes isolating a limb or an orifice to make it the central subject of a composition. In some of his works, the smallest fragment becomes monumental, exalted; in others, it is the whole body in motion that is sublimated. Most of his pieces are graphite drawings on felt (fabric), a technique that lends the surface a sensitive, almost vibrating texture. For Augmented bodies, the artist focuses on the leg muscle of Night, one of the allegorical figures Michelangelo sculpted for the Tomb of Giuliano de' Medici in Florence. In this piece, Zhang glorifies the power of a leg - even in repose. Is a hypertrophied muscle already a form of bodily enhancement? By borrowing from classical statuary, the artist questions contemporary athletic practices - especially bodybuilding - and the limits we impose (or not) on the development of the human body. In his composition Study in Figures, Yunyao superimposes full-length classical sculptural groups by another two Renaissance Italian sculptors Giambologna and Cellini, creating a feeling of strength and a near-lyrical sense of vertical aspiration. This elevation evokes the battles of gods, demigods, and mortals in Greek and Roman mythology - a quest for omnipotence expressed through physical prowess and athletic feats. As if possessing a powerful body were a sign of divine favour.