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Ariane Michel
Plastic artist, filmmaker
October 2022
Raphaël Krafft
Ariane Michel
- Visual Arts
- Miami
“I seek to disrupt the scale and hierarchy of beings and to involve the viewer in new mental geographies that include the rest of the living. “
My films, installations, and performances challenge the way we perceive reality. I investigate non-human territories, such as animals, plants, minerals, and elements, with the help of cinematic tools, placing a particular emphasis on sound. By meddling with our ways of existing in the world, I seek to shake up the ranks and hierarchies between beings, implicating the spectator in newfound psychic geographies that consider all other living things. In doing so, I attempt to unravel our anthropocentric relationship to the world forged by European civilizations.
Ariane Michel is a plastic artist and a filmmaker. She has exhibited her work where life thrives in all its forms, such as in museums and art centers, movie theaters, streets, forests, underground corridors, places of worship, and seashores. Her work has been featured at FID Marseille, IFF Rotterdam, Locarno, Art Basel, Musée du Jeu de paume, Musée d’Art moderne de Paris, MoMA, La Criée centre d’art in Rennes, the Anthology Film Archives and in Bronx Park, but also on Place de la Concorde, in a Swiss forest or a window displays at Galeries Lafayette, in the gardens of Fondation Cartier, inside a church in Britanny, and at the Great Mosque in Paris on the occasion of the 2020 “Nuit Blanche.
During my residency in Florida, I intend to develop a new feature-length film that will build on my film Les Hommes and on the videos that I create like modern myths with the non-human positioned at the center of the world. I plan to look at Miami through the eyes of those realms deemed “inhospitable” to humankind, among the alligators. Winding my way through mangroves and the Everglades, with amphibians and water birds, I will infiltrate human settlements through the doorway of the “wild” worlds that still inhabit them. The goal is to change perspective and conceive of this modern city-colony as one element among many. Could a society of spiders, crabs, and mosquitoes help us decolonize our relationship with the rest of the natural world?
While Florida, more specifically the Everglades and Miami, gradually sinks into the sea, I will be exploring the southern parts of the Sunshine State that have seen a surge of human activity over the last 150 years or so. I want to enter humankind’s own wild spaces, right through to the Miami metropolitan area, whose endless expansion remains undeterred by its inevitable fate.
In partnership with
Art Explora
The brainchild of entrepreneur and philanthropist Frédéric Jousset, the Art Explora Foundation, which launched in November 2019, aims to close the cultural divide through a series of initiatives in France and abroad, drawing on new technologies and mobile systems open to everyone. It seeks to connect works with their audiences and to support new creation and innovation. The Foundation is co-curating eight residencies for the inaugural season of Villa Albertine.
Musée Gassendi
The Gassendi Museum, which garners the title ‘Musée of France,’ holds a collection that can be visited in and outside the walls. Founded in 1889, the museum has had, from its inception, a dual vocation in arts and science, which today is reinforced by a museography inspired by the cabinets of curiosities.
The diversity of art and science collections in the 17th-century building presents the natural and patrimonial wealth of its territory – it is a permanent and evolving exhibition space in which artists work in situ alongside more classic collections. The contemporary art collection can be discovered by walking through the mountains.
The philosophical legacy of humanist scholar, Pierre Gassendi, which his contemporary, René Descartes, summed up in the saying “ambulo ergo sum / I walk, therefore I am” inspired the idea of opening the museum outside of its walls: the Museum in the mountains.
