Since the great explosion, we no longer have any notion of time. What is the use in counting the years when it is impossible to discern day from night? A perpetual cloud of smoke blocks the sun's rays, casting the planet in infinite darkness. The seasons are lost in a continuum of cold colors and dark temperatures. The origin of the great explosion is unknown, with some saying it was an instant nuclear war between now-forgotten powers, others claiming divine punishment or even an extraterrestrial attack. Whatever the explanation is, it will not change our situation.
What we know for a fact is that the Earth shivered for many minutes as the sky was flushed with thousands of flashes of electric lightning before being replaced by this cloud of grey cloudy dust. Some died instantly, and others languished for days, their skin quickly crumbling. Those who died in the first hours were the luckiest because they did not need survival. They didn't have to tear down to fix things, they didn't have to abandon to advance, and they didn't have to murder to live. We die a slower death, doomed to err on the side of what the ruins of late capitalism have left us. Overall, we must live with the memory of all that we will never experience any longer, of all those faces that we will never see again.
To protect ourselves from the day that never ends and the vampires that dwell in it, we have found refuge in what seems to have been a junkyard. Metal is essential protection against this invisible harm that corrodes our skin and stains our eyes red, an evil that gradually burdens us. We are safe from the world's dangers in this heap of useless metal, in this clatter of sheet metal and rubbish. The prowlers do not come to trouble us in this filthy gloom. Away from the chaos, we build the outline of a new universe, the genesis of a future that will be written for us by others, the hybrid forms between a civilization to come and one that is no more.
In this scrap metal workshop, we are reminded that we are the waste of a system that has failed to renew itself, the sick excrescence of a common error, and the haggard residues of machines that no longer work. This metal that protects us today is the same that led to our downfall. Before the great explosion, we were pulling minerals from the ground, smelting, and mixing them with other minerals. We had machines for everything and anything, polluting our environment. One day, long before the big explosion, we were told that the Earth had nothing more to offer us, so the economic crises, pandemics, and wars began. This is how the end started.
« Apex » is a jump to a post-explosion world, in which artworks are reified into characters of a science-fiction short story. Living in a scrapyard, the metaphor of an extractivist society that no longer exists, artworks remind us that the way we currently use the planet's resources brings us into danger. Using the scrapyard as a shelter and a starting point for a new world, the artworks selected for the show are the poison and the cure for today's problems.
ThunderCage uses the nearby metal dump, a place that served as a source and as a receptacle for artists. The exhibition takes the form of a Giff walk, and works are presented Around the displacement zone.
