Seen last Saturday: VéloMagnéto by Gerry Oulevay combines a training bike and a (discarded-then-saved) audio player that allows people to listen to a story written by Antoinette Rychner. This piece is part of an exhibit called “Faire (avec)” (“Do (with)”) at Musée de Bagnes in Valais (Switzerland). Gerry is one the participants in our research project.
The exhibit is about topics which are quite close to the main theme of our project, except it’s more speculative. It’s focused on the following angle:
The year 2080, in an alpine region. The known world has been turned upside down. Shaken by ecological, energy and economic crises, modernity is no more. Next to the church in Le Châble, a building houses a space where you can find tools, spare parts, documents, words and images to decipher, to invent and reappropriate practices and imaginaries. The “Faire (avec)” exhibition, presented without electricity, is a proposal to visit the museum’s rooms as if they were spaces discovered by people passing through, who had established a place of creation and reflection with the vestiges of the past. It’s a way for the Musée de Bagnes to seize on today’s omnipresent warning of the systemic ecological crisis, and the rethinking of contemporary concepts to question the heritage of a regional museum as a resource for the future.
In addition to this, Nicolas was invited to write a text for the catalog exhibit about what would remain of digital cultures in such kind of futures. In order to discuss such topic, Nicolas addressed some of the results from the current field research, namely, about the re-use of discarded electronics, the afterlives of artifacts and spare parts, as well as digital practices. Thanks a lot to Musée de Bagnes and Mélanie Hugon-Duc for this occasion to share our research.