Exhibition - " The Whole is Always Smaller than its Parts" - Atelier Claude Closky

The Whole is Always Smaller than its Parts
We’re over­taken by events.

Curated by Olivier Bémer and Elsa Michaud

Opening on Wednesday May, 17, 2017 from 6 to 9 pm.
Exhibition from Wednesday, May 17 to Saturday, May 20, 2017.

For the second time, Claude Closky’s stu­dents will dis­play their works at Bétonsalon – Center for Art and Research for a short exhi­bi­tion within the exhi­bi­tion.
Emmanuelle Lainé allowed the artists to take over the exhi­bi­tion space by responding to her instal­la­tion Incremental Self: Transparent Bodies.

With: Chadine Amghar, Olivier Bémer, Clément Bleu—Pays, Kim Bradford, Inès Dobelle, Margot Douay, Jonás Fadrique, Elias Gama Paez, Manon Gignoux, Nastassia Kotava, Cham Lavant, Elsa Michaud, Martin Poulain, Sacha Rey, Matthew Young Chan Junn, Yann Yue Yuan

“For instance, how ants, without any super-organism and in the absence of cen­tral plan­ning such as the ‘spirit of the anthill’, are none the less able to design such exquisitely func­tional nests.
[…] No ant ‘sees the whole nest.
[…] And yet, people seem to marvel, in the end, that there are struc­tures and orders
[…] When we say, for instance, that inter­acting ants unwit­tingly pro­duce a per­fectly designed ant nest ‘without’ being them­selves aware of the ‘overall plan’, we might have unwit­tingly con­fused two dif­ferent observing points of view: that of the ant and that of the ethol­o­gist. This is what causes the dis­con­nec­tion in saying that ants, through their blind inter­ac­tions, ‘gen­erate’ the emerging struc­ture of the nest. Strictly speaking, they gen­erate nothing of the sort.
[…] What we call the ‘emerging struc­ture of the nest’ is a ques­tion that inter­ests the human observer but not the ants them­selves.
[…] ‘Atomistic-inter­ac­tions-between-blind-antsnone-the-less–able-to-solve-the-problem-of-overall-social-order’ is not what ants are after.”

Bruno Latour, 2012, “The whole is always smaller than its parts’– a dig­ital test of Gabriel Tardes’ monads”. The British Journal of Sociology, 2012, Volume 63, Issue 4

"Un hyper­objet se dis­tingue par sa grande dif­fu­sion dans le temps et dans l’espace, qui est telle qu’on ne peut plus en iden­ti­fier les con­tours et les lim­ites. C’est le cas pour les phénomènes écologiques : lorsque je cherche à iden­ti­fier la biosphère, je perçois la per­sonne en face de moi, la table à laquelle nous sommes assis, mais je ne vois pas l’objet « biosphère » en soi. Pourquoi ? Parce que j’en fais partie, parce que je suis moi-même la biosphère.
En dépit de leur unité, les par­ties qui com­posent les hyper­ob­jets ne sont pas moins réelles que la totalité. Pendant des années, on a con­sidéré que le tout était supérieur à ses par­ties. Or je pense que ce n’est pas le cas, et que cette con­cep­tion est sim­ple­ment un « retweet » du monothéisme, où l’homme est placé en rela­tion d’inféri­orité par rap­port à une entité plus grande et plus puis­sante que lui. Pour coex­ister de manière non-vio­lente avec nos sem­blables et les autres créa­tures naturelles, il nous faut d’abord accepter l’idée que le tout puisse être inférieur à ses par­ties."

Timothy Morton, "Les “hy­per­ob­jets”, le super­con­cept qui révo­lu­tionne la pensée écologique", Les inrocks, 21.11.2015

"If you want to make the world a better place, you have to start with where power has gone. It’s very dif­fi­cult to see. We live in a world where we see our­selves as inde­pen­dent indi­vid­uals. If you’re an inde­pen­dent indi­vidual, you don’t really think in terms of power. You think only in terms of your own influ­ence on the world.
What you don’t see is what people in the past were more able to see. When you are in groups, you can be very pow­erful. You can change things. You have con­fi­dence when things go wrong that you don’t when you’re on your own. That’s why the whole con­cept of power has dwin­dled. We’re encour­aged just to talk about our­selves and our feel­ings towards others. We’re not encour­aged to see our­selves as part of any­thing.
But the com­puters know the truth. They see us as a group. We’re actu­ally quite sim­ilar to each other. We have the same desires, ambi­tions, and fears. Computers spot this through cor­re­la­tions and pat­terns.
Computers can see us as large groups, but they’re glum and only aggre­gate us to sell us stuff. In reality, the com­puters give great insight into the power of common iden­tity between groups. No one’s using that. What’s sit­ting with the com­puters is a way of seeing new groups, new common iden­ti­ties between people."

"Adam Curtis on the dan­gers of self-expres­sion", inter­view in the Creative Independent, March 14, 2017

Installation of the exhibition "The Whole is Always Smaller than its Parts", May 2017, Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research.

Installation of the exhibition "The Whole is Always Smaller than its Parts", May 2017, Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research.

View of the exhibition "The Whole is Always Smaller than its Parts", May 2017, Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research.