24.11 > 31.12.2024 | Exhibition Cartographies of the Sensible | Tetouan Institute and Art Center (Ma)

This “ex/position” was born from the desire to bring together, within the same dynamic and the same space/time, the dimensions of research/sciences (the conference “TEXTE [S-oN] IMAGE 7”) and creation/arts. It features a selection of multi/inter-media works that highlight a hybridization of practices, imaginaries, and forms. These are the (im)materialization of different “digital writings” as well as aesthetics in the sense that the philosopher Jacques Rancière understands it, namely, “a theory of art that relates it to its effects on sensibility, a specific regime of identification and thought in the arts: a mode of articulation between ways of doing, forms of visibility of these ways of doing, and modes of thinkability of their relationships, involving a certain idea of the effectiveness of thought.” (Jacques Rancière, “The Politics of Aesthetics,” La Fabrique éditions, 2000). It is about situating “beyond debates on the crisis of art or the death of the image, which replay the endless scene of the end of utopias,” to “share the sensible,” which, for Rancière, involves a certain (re)distribution of possibilities. This “sensible” should not obliterate thought; it is also about opening alternative perceptions that form rhizomes and lines of flight. Husserl reminds us that “the phenomenological concept of sense is defined by its structural connection to sensibility, against the thesis of its autonomy. Sense is therefore not primarily a phenomenon of knowledge or language but a sensible phenomenon: a content of perception, inherent to the relationship that the sensing body has with the sensed world” (Excerpt from Paula Lorette’s presentation text, “The Sensitization of Sense: From Husserl to French Phenomenology,” Hermann éditions, 2021), once again placing corporeality at the heart of our intersubjectivities and our alter egos.

This question, in its creative hypermediality, drives us in the accelerated mutations of digital cultures and arts. We leave the manifestations of the “Grand Spectacle,” which has taken over technologies and digital imaginaries to produce “shows” and “environments” that often saturate the senses without generating meaning. Here, our desire is to present, in different spaces of the Art Center and the Art School of Tétouan, works (some are new creations, most of which have never been shown in Tétouan or Morocco) that are directly or indirectly participatory, representing as many intersections, encounters, and shifts that situate themselves within a context to give it perspective and augment it. Many of the twenty or so selected projects (each with a particular connection to contributors or structures associated with the conference) explore what Marc Veyrat calls “eSPACE,” “both a hybrid place and a new territory, an inter-space made up of an infinity of mixed-reality spaces” (Excerpt from the rationale for the conference “Art and Sensitive Cartographies: The Question of Interfaces in Mixed Realities,” organized by Carole Brandon and Marc Veyrat on May 11-12, 2020, at the Congress Center of Chambéry, Le Manège). The particularity of “eSPACE” (beyond its very writing, which proposes a point of rupture in its enclosures) lies in its stratifications, because “mixed reality forms a spatial composite made of the hybridization of a physical and digital space. The space of mixed reality is not the addition of a physical space and a digital space but the vortex born from the interactional flows generated by encounters between individuals.” (Quotation from the rationale for the conference “Art and Sensitive Cartographies: The Question of Interfaces in Mixed Realities” (op.cit.), borrowed from sociologist Jean-François Lucas).

Multiplication, augmentation, branching, sedimentation, fractalization… and here, more than ever, inter/trans-connections of dimensions and macro/micro universes becoming what Carole Brandon calls “floating inter-spaces,” multiform, which “provide resistance and breathing space to the media smoothing, the flattening of images now present on social networks” (Philippe Franck, Carole Brandon, “Inter-Spaces and Hypermedia Devices,” Turbulences Vidéo, No. 118, January 2023, p. 106). Several projects integrate Artificial Intelligence in their process, associated with the fourth industrial revolution—the transition to so-called “intelligent” and connected production systems made possible by the accelerated evolution of digital technologies. Here again, Art—”all too human”—seems to us a particularly interesting spur to question the various uses and challenges of this AI, which is disrupting the creative, scientific, and educational fields, while also incorporating and diverting it (too) into the poetic, the intuitive, the indefinable… and an essential indiscipline that it still lacks. In their diversity, these installations, performances, networked devices, and applications are also as many “sensitive cartographies,” whose data are not quantitative or objective but above all qualitative, emotional, and subjective. They constitute an open “spatium,” crossed and shaped by affects, sensitive topographies, and sensibility. “The project of the sensitive map (…) challenges the idea that science is hermetic to art and vice versa: it opens a breach to probe their affinities” (Elise Olmédo, “Sensitive Cartographies, Emotions and Imagination,” published on September 19, 2021, on the site visiocarto.net).

The sensitive map allows cartography to be anchored in both lived and imagined space. It proposes alternative experiential/experimental modes and representations where more classical ones neglect these intersections/extensions, convergences between artistic and scientific contributions and questions that nourish the interzone of our immediate future.