Marguerite Humeau
Humeau's speculations on the existence of extinct worlds, parallel presents, lost mental landscapes, or futures that have not come yet and the aspects that connect them to our own encourages audiences to ask questions surrounding what it means to be human.
[4] Echoes was a work that navigated questions of what it means to explore the spectrum between life and death, and how these divides between realms become more complicated in light of technological developments.
[3] The installation also featured two sculptures that were inspired by two Ancient Egyptian gods related to fertility, Wadjet (King Cobra) and Taweret, reimagined as animals on a production line.
Wadjet (King Cobra) was injecting itself with its own venom to create its own antidote, and Taweret was producing an elixir of life from various animal bodily fluids such as hippopotamus milk.
The voice was heard as if it was metamorphosing following the mutation of the FOXP2 gene, and followed visitors through the corridors of the exhibition, evoking human experiences on Earth through natural landscapes and the birth of language.
Humeau's show Ecstasies at Kunstverein Hamburg, acting in sequence to the exhibition Birth Canal at the New Museum in 2018–2019, extended the artist's interest in engaging with extinct cultures and ecosystems.
In particular, Hagens's thesis that Paleolithic Venus figures may have not been art pieces, but instead recipes for the ingestion of various animal brains that were supposed to contain psychoactive substances.
As highlighted in Studio International’s interview with the artist, Humeau’s show High Tide at the Centre Pompidou in 2019 continued these themes and displayed a series of marine mammals, dancing and praying.
[3] One of them, entitled The Myth Teller, was an invisible marine mammal, heard travelling through space, that was using language attributed to the whales and dolphins that we are familiar with, clicks and whistles, to react to an imagined human-induced great flood that created their society.
Humeau’s Migrations series consisted of three large-scale sculptures displayed at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani in 2022.
In connection to the themes Humeau explored with Mist and High Tide, Migrations navigates non-human animal reactions to climate change in the Venetian context with the highest rates of flooding the city has seen in the 21st century.
These works were constructed from "biological and synthetic resin and polymers, salt, algae, seaweed, bone, pigments, mineral dust, ocean plastic, glass and stainless steel.
This layer is where dead matter on the surface decomposes and is reborn, imagined in this body of work as a place where humans could find answers for new ways of being in the world.
Humeau's inspiration for this work includes the doctrine of signatures, the idea that plants which resemble certain parts of the body could be used to treat specific ailments.
[13] Rise reimagines this encounter, an experience that is translated in a queer, monumental sculpture hand-painted by Humeau in shades of local wines, referencing a "tree of life".
[14] Humeau's research for the project involved conversations with wine producers, healers, geologists and specialists in alchemic traditions, renewable energies and botanists.
"[15] Inspired by John Koenig's Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, the ways in which we exist, how we feel emotions that are not defined, and do not understand are the intersections that Humeau aims to uncover.
The second chapter, taking place in a tunnel opened between two of the galleries, showed a film produced in collaboration with Dall-E AI, examining the ritual dances of termites around a spiral fungus and allowing visitors to trace their journeys.
As detailed by the press release, this part of the work is titled Collective Effervescence in reference to Emile Durkheim's notion of a society bonding together through "common thought, to participate in a communal action.
Taking inspiration from bees and wasp nests as well as termite mounds - the work ultimately aims to make the viewer a witness to a constantly evolving ecosystem that is attempting to find equilibrium.
"[22] Continuing her exploration into questions of embodiment, and metamorphosis, Humeau worked with Shae Whitney of DRAM Apothecary to transform the land into an elixir that human visitors could absorb, consuming Orisons before or as they were entering it, with the hope that they would themselves merge within the landscape.
Inspired by "flying ointments" fabled to induce ethereal visions and lucid dreams, the elixir was crafted by Dram Apothecary using plants foraged on Orisons.
