Scattering – The Beginning of a New Adventure

Critical Zones | Exhibition closing and concert


[09.01.2022]


Guests:


Bruno Latour, curator of Critical Zones
Jérôme Gaillardet, geochemist
Jean Pierre Seyvos, composer
Les Epopées (Marie-Suzanne de Loye and Agnès
Boissonnot-Guilbault, bass viol, Arnaud Condé, recorder, bassoon
and dulcian)
Claire Lefilliâtre, soprano
Stéphane Fuget, direction and organ
Olivier Duperron, sound designer
Médéric Collignon, vocalist
Benjamin Miller, sound engineer
Benoît Verjat, research designer
Produced by Chantal Latour


Let’s close the exhibition »Critical Zones« with a bang! Join us
for a collective listening experience on zoom, carried by an
original music composition, a shared reading and discussion with
Bruno Latour and other guests. Let us celebrate the end of the
physical show and the beginning of its scattering. Bring your
best headphones!


The exhibition Critical Zones has recreated in ZKM from May 2020
to January 2022 the tiny surface of the Earth that has been
modified by life over the eons. This recreation has been done
through an extraordinary mix of science and art. It has resisted
the pandemic and has given birth to a marvellous catalog
published at MIT that will assemble for a long time to come the
work of all the participants. But exhibitions, even “thought
exhibitions”, are not made to last, they are part of what is
called in French “spectacles vivants”. Like a concert, a play or
a dance they are given to the public which has to be present to
appreciate their beauty, and then, and then, and then they vanish
and remain in the memory of their visitors. This is why they are
alive.


But in this case, we wish Critical Zones not only to live in the
memory of its audience or through the pages of its catalog, but
to shift into another life. Not only because a part of it will
travel to India, but because we wish it to close with a bang! Or,
rather with a form of dispersion. Yes, we wish that the rather
sad moment of the finissage, on January 9, 2022, be transformed
into a distribution of its intuitions, ideas and pronouncements
to many other people. A scattering! For this, no medium is better
than music, and nothing better in music than what Is called
“scat” in Jazz. So on that fateful day, an original musical
composition by Jean-Pierre Seyvos, interspersed with readings
from the works of one of the curators, Bruno Latour, and the main
scientist responsible for the show, the geochemist Jerome
Gaillardet, will help celebrate both the end of the physical show
and the beginning of its scattering. Since the pandemic seems to
be rather obstinate in closing down meetings, we will resist its
threat by doing the ceremony online through innovative techniques
in the same way we did the opening. Long live Critical Zones.