MotherS/Cells_Nymphs

“We are humus, not Homo (…); we are compost, not posthuman”  — Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble

One day, certain forms appear before we have found the categories capable of accommodating them. They seem to emerge from a parallel time, from a zone where matter has begun to produce its own hypotheses. Not unknown objects, but presences that have yet to acquire a status: possible organisms, biological architectures, fragments of a world whose rules might be slightly different from our own. Raphaël Emine’s work embraces this fictional interval in which sculpture sheds its object-like skin to become a species. His works do not simply prompt us to question what we see, but rather: “What conditions make this form possible?” They function as open-ended experiments, sensory prototypes, machines for imagining life differently.

For his solo exhibition MotherS/Cells_Nymphs at Galerie Nicolas Salloum, the artist pursues his exploration of hybrid forms that shift the boundaries between the organic and the mineral, thereby bringing into view a taxonomy that has yet to be invented, a catalogue of future or extinct species for which we do not yet possess the language. Here, ceramics becomes an experimental medium. A laboratory-material for the artist, it records multiple temporalities: that of the earth before the artwork, that of the human gesture, that of the mechanical gesture, that of sporadic vegetal growth, that of chemical reactions and, more slowly, that of evolution. The processes employed by Raphaël Emine, such as 3D printing, modelling, immersion, firing and refiring, do not seek to impose a definitive form upon matter. Rather, they orchestrate an encounter between control and chance emergence.

Surfaces crack, contract and become covered in mycetes: they develop membranes and scars, each containing within itself the chronology of a poetic advent: that of the fictional microcosm the artist constructs. The sculpture’s dermis is no longer a boundary between its interior and exterior: it becomes an interface, a passageway where things and ideas circulate; parasites, insects, free-flowing glazes.

Something seems to have happened within these forms... Or perhaps something is still in the process of coming into being? In the story the artist constructs, the works are not representations of a possible life, but rather the material conditions for its emergence.

Certain forms by Raphaël evoke nests, shelters, shells or biological architectures. Sculpture is thus shifted towards a logic of habitat: a form never exists in isolation, but through the relationships it makes possible on its surface or at its core. This attention to life forms other than human beings runs throughout Raphaël Emine’s practice. His earlier research into habitats designed for insects, strongly informed by entomological research, extends a reflection on the possibility of an inhabited sculpture, an active sculptural environment.

As Vinciane Despret writes, beings are never entirely separate from the situations that bring them into existence. They transform alongside the worlds in which they participate. The egg, too, runs through this research as a form of pre-birth. The artist chooses to release this figure from its own closure: it then appears as an incubation chamber for a still undefined form, originating from a speculative future.

Perhaps these are the remnants of a civilisation that has yet to exist? Or perhaps the archives of a life form we are still unable to identify? This temporal uncertainty constitutes one of the most fertile spaces in Raphaël Emine’s work.

Within the exhibition, the artist brings into view what is already at work in our worlds: the invisible alliances between species, materials and temporalities.

Salomé Moindjie-Gallet