Swamp, a germinating stage brings together artists Lou le Forban and Félix Touzalin for an exhibition that looks like a nocturnal encounter. The idea is to stand at marsh level, among the glimmering reeds, and make it the theatre of a germination between practices. To this fictional setting is added a very specific temporality, that of the end of winter, a dreamlike moment when animals and plants are in latency, on the threshold of their awakening, curled up beneath the earth. Swamp, a germinating stage is therefore a phase of renewal, a stage for the unfolding of bodies in regrowth.

Having created the Triovisible collective after graduating from the Beaux-arts de Paris in 2020 with artist Diane Chéry, this proposal follows on the project for a performative exhibition entitled A performative journey shown in 2022 at the Jeune création gallery in Romainville.

Behind this geography of risk, we also turn to the imaginary world of storytelling. From our childhood fantasies and fears emerges a certain type of monster, one that makes us grow up as much as it scares us. A hollow in reality, an absence that must be filled; full of potential; a body we don’t have and which would allow us to do things differently. Here we are dealing with a landscape body whose magma-like propensity to transform, to drip, echoes our liquefying world. The swamp creature is also a reference to 70s horror cinema, with its childish tinkering and outdated special effects.

The cinematic image is explored in the exhibition in terms of historical narrative and myth in Tohu va bohu, a hybrid film made by Lou Le Forban with Le Fresnoy. It tells the story of a village in the Alpes de hautes Provence hit by an epidemic of dancing plague that plunges humans and animals into a trance. It is a collage, made up of drawings and elements modeled in 3D, human characters filmed in live action, and paper puppets animals.

In his installation and performance Embardée, Revers, Augure, Félix Touzalin examines the power of slipping and blundering as a way of disrupting design. Reversing the design that prefigures and decides a priori the destinies of gestures and materials, he returns to the origins of performance by defending a physicality of the unpredictable, with non-linear trajectories.

In this exhibition, Lou le Forban and Félix Touzalin are also creating bas-reliefs, combining painting, embroidery and metalwork to fictionalise the myth of the rendez-vous in this marsh landscape.