10.54103/ai/19512
This paper aims to demonstrate how Laure Prouvost’s artistic practice requires an immersion of the viewer in intermedial installations composed of objects from the most disparate spatial and temporal origins. Since the early 2000s, the French artist has intentionally created surreal mise-en-scenes which, by blending video, painting, drawing, sculpture, and performance, can be understood as compositions or collages made of visual references taken from different contexts such as pop culture, the web, and private photo albums. Prouvost’s works are “unstable visual entities,” made of images that aggregate in heterogeneous configurations, generating eccentric atmospheres and cancelling every hierarchical order between the observer and the observed. Viewers are encouraged to fill the space by becoming objects among other objects. By using the Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) as philosophical and methodological support, this paper will focus more closely on the analysis of Deep See Blue Surrounding You / Vois Ce Bleu Profond Te Fondre (2019), the project Prouvost produced for the French Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale. On this occasion, her work They Parlaient Idéale (2019) – a video documenting the Mediterranean Sea journey that brings her to the Venetian lagoon – was the cornerstone of a multifaceted environmental installation. Assuming a critical and analytical approach, this contribution then discusses the role Deep See Blue Surrounding You plays as a “hyper-enactment:” it is a mise-en-scene that consists of interrelationships between “things/images” that aggregate as objects, but it is also a composition in which the viewers are “viscously” asked to generate their personal, non-linear narration.
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Stefano Mudu
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AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433]
Venice Biennale
Laure Prouvost’s Deep See Blue Surrounding You: An Immersive Environment Made of Objects
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2023-12-29
2023-01-05
2023-12-29
2024-02-23
AN-ICON
Stefano Mudu
2023/12/29
10.54103/ai/19512
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
2785-7433
II
Venice Biennale
en
Tenconi, R., ed., Grand Dad’s Visitor Center (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2019, exhibition catalogue).
Laure Prouvost’s Deep See Blue Surrounding You: An Immersive Environment Made of Objects
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/download/19512/20013
2
             Laure Prouvost’s
             Deep See Blue
Surrounding You: An Immersive
Environment
by Stefano Mudu
                Made
        Laure Prouvost
                       of Objects
                  Surrealism
                  Object-oriented ontology
                  Hyper-enactment
                  Venice Biennale




                     Issue №2            Year 2023
                     → Immersions and Dives:
                     From the Environment
                     to Virtual Reality
                     Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina,
                     Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello
Laure Prouvost’s Deep See
Blue Surrounding You:
An Immersive Environment
Made of Objects
STEFANO MUDU, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0680-2621
https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19512



Abstract                      This paper aims to demonstrate how Laure
                 Prouvost’s artistic practice requires an immersion of the
                 viewer in intermedial installations composed of objects
                 from the most disparate spatial and temporal origins. Since
                 the early 2000s, the French artist has intentionally created
                 surreal mise-en-scenes which, by blending video, painting,
                 drawing, sculpture, and performance, can be understood
                 as compositions or collages made of visual references tak-
                 en from different contexts such as pop culture, the web, and
                 private photo albums. Prouvost’s works are “unstable visual
                 entities,” made of images that aggregate in heterogeneous
                 configurations, generating eccentric atmospheres and can-
                 celling every hierarchical order between the observer and
                 the observed. Viewers are encouraged to fill the space by
                 becoming objects among other objects.
                              By using the Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO)
                 as philosophical and methodological support, this paper will
                 focus more closely on the analysis of Deep See Blue Sur-
                 rounding You / Vois Ce Bleu Profond Te Fondre (2019), the
                 project Prouvost produced for the French Pavilion at the 58th
                 Venice Biennale. On this occasion, her work They Parlaient
                 Idéale (2019) – a video documenting the Mediterranean Sea
                 journey that brings her to the Venetian lagoon – was the
                 cornerstone of a multifaceted environmental installation.



STEFANO MUDU                                   110                                     AN-ICON
                            Assuming a critical and analytical approach,
                this contribution then discusses the role Deep See Blue
                Surrounding You plays as a “hyper-enactment:” it is a
                mise-en-scene that consists of interrelationships between
               “things/images” that aggregate as objects, but it is also a
                composition in which the viewers are “viscously” asked to
                generate their personal, non-linear narration.




Keywords        Laure Prouvost           Surrealism         Object-oriented ontology
                Hyper-enactment Venice Biennale
To quote this essay: S. Mudu, “Laure Prouvost’s Deep See Blue Surrounding You: An Immersive
Environment Made of Objects,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2,
no. 2 (2023): 110-126, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19512.

STEFANO MUDU                                 111                                     AN-ICON
A trip to our unconscious									
With the help of our brains in our tentacles,					
we dig tunnels to the past and the future towards Venice.1
                            It is neither trivial nor negligible that the term
              “surreal” recurs in the many critical essays and contributions
               that have attempted to provide a complete – although hard-
               ly exhaustive – description of Laure Prouvost’s art practice.
               And indeed, the appellation seems to fit perfectly if one
               considers that, in line with the avant-garde sensibility, the
               French artist’s works appear as mis-en-scène (or as we will
               say later, enactments) with a programmatically eccentric
               aesthetic as to “freely alternate the experience of daily life
               with imaginary, dreamlike sensation.”2
                            Pop culture allusions intertwine with biograph-
               ical narratives; historical sources and events are polluted
               by the exuberant use of private memories; consolidated
               linguistic codes and aesthetic canons are cancelled by
               a good dose of automatism and improvisation: in other
               words, thanks to the juxtaposition of heterogeneous ele-
               ments taken from more or less distant realities, Prouvost’s
               works seem to create a universe of reveries that follows the
               poetic and emotional ambiguities of that famous “surreality”
               promoted by André Breton.3 Moreover, as if to embrace
               the Freudian creed of the father of the French avant-garde,
               each installation by the artist seems to be the place of a
               real mediation between truth and fiction, functioning as a
               threshold for a reality similar to the subconscious, in which




      1 M. Kirszenbaum, ed., Laure Prouvost: Deep See Blue Sourrounding You / Vois ce bleu
      profonde te fondre (press kit/ English) (Venice: 2019): 9. https://www.citedesartsparis.net/
      media/cia/183726-press_release_en.pdf, accessed December 12, 2022.
      2 R. Tenconi, ed., Grand Dad’s Visitor Center (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2019, exhibition
      catalogue): 16.
      3 Famous and descriptive of the attitude in question is the first definition of “surreality” offered
      by Breton in the first Manifesto of the avant-garde: “I believe in the future resolution of these
      two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute
      reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.” See A. Breton, “First Manifesto of Surrealism
      (1924),” in C. Harrison, P. Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1900­-1990: An Anthology of
      Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992): 432-439, 436.

STEFANO MUDU                                     112                                            AN-ICON
              each subject is required to immerse themselves and create
              a personal narrative and/or vision.4
                            Beyond the conceptual purposes of such an
              approach – which very poetically allude to the possibili-
              ty of annulling any canon to celebrate the supremacy of
              subjectivity in every field of experience and knowledge,
              from religion to sexuality, from ecology to psychology –
              the outcome of this immersion in images is achieved by
              Prouvost thanks to the creation of compositions. Indeed,
              as will be explicitly stated below, each work is presented
              as a shape-shifting installation which not only integrates
              video, painting, drawing, sculpture and performance, but
              treats the materials derived from the use of these media
              as autonomous and ever changing “objects.” As they are
             “unstable visual entities,” they are not only “ready-made,”
              taken from the most disparate contexts – mass culture,
              the web or family albums; they are often objects created
              by Prouvost herself for other projects, which continuously
              migrate from one work to another, adding new levels of
              space-time stratification to the last one in the series. In any
              case – whether they are commonly used materials, created
              from scratch or already part of the artist’s repertoire – each
              of them joins the others in such elaborate configurations
              as to require the viewer to immerse themselves completely
              in the installation. Laure Prouvost’s intention, indeed, is to
              create “networks” of meaning and connections between
              the objects to make the observer feel immersed in the body
              of her works. As the observer enters the installations, the
              hierarchies among the objects are eliminated and they be-
              come an object among other objects; now consumed by
              the composition.




      4 In the introduction to her Legsicon – a book published in 2019 in the occasion of AM-
      BIG-YOU-US LEGSICON, the solo show she presented at MhKA in Anntwerp – Prouvost
      argues that her editorial and exhibition project functions almost as a guide for the viewer who,
      together with her, “will be digging deeper and deeper into the subconscious.” See L. Prouvost,
     “Introduction,” in N. Haq, ed., Legsicon: Laure Prouvost (Bruges-Antwerp: Books Works with M
      HKA, 2019, exhibition catalogue): 7.

STEFANO MUDU                                   113                                          AN-ICON
                                Surreal compositions, immersive
                                installations

                              The operations of doubling, repetition, manip-
               ulation or aggregation that all these materials are subject
               to (or simply their abundance in a single installation) make
               it difficult to provide a unitary, linear, complete description
               of the “contradictory surreality” which distinguishes the
               compositions they participate of or give life to. A sensation
               that is often intensified by the use of architectural structures
               capable of mediating their appearance and producing in
               the viewer a more vivid sensation of immersion in absurd
               scenarios, characterized by spatial as well as temporal and
               conceptual exuberance.
                              For instance, in They Are Waiting for You (2017),
               an installation conceived for the Walker Art Center in Min-
               neapolis,5 the artist had brought together an abundance
               of everyday objects (plants, tables, chairs, breast-shaped
               sculptures, posters, etc.) which unsurprisingly became pro-
               tagonists of a broad reflection on language. According to
               Prouvost, even oral or written communication is the expres-
               sion of an ambiguous surreality: word by word, it helps to
               get the sense of the world but it also generates constant
               misunderstandings.
                              As suggested by the title, the viewer found all
               these materials in a waiting room after walking a short cor-
               ridor that separated them from the rest of the museum
               (from full-blown reality). Here, alongside the objects, there
               was also the video-performance Dit Learn (2015) in which
               Prouvost, with a persuasive whisper, addressed the patrons
               involving them in learning new forms of communication by
               deconstructing and undermining consolidated knowledge.6

      5 The work has evolved over the years, and in addition to having modified various installation
      variables in many exhibition venues, it has also become a samesake theater piece presented
      for the first time in Minneapolis when the exhibition opened. See “Laure Prouvost in
      collaboration with Sam Belinfante and Pierre Droulers: They Are Waiting for You,” Walker
      Art Center, https://walkerart.org/calendar/2018/laure-prouvost-in-collaboration-with-sam-
      belinfante-and-pierre-droulers-they-are-waiting-for-you, accessed December 12, 2022.
      6 For any further information about the project, see V. Sung, “Laure Prouvost’s Artworks Need
      You to Exist,” Walker Art Center, https://walkerart.org/magazine/laure-prouvost-they-are-
      waiting-for-you-installation, accessed December 9, 2022.

STEFANO MUDU                                   114                                         AN-ICON
               Indeed, as the critic and curator Nav Haq has argued, this
               space was conceived as a meeting place for the viewer
               and many common objects which acquired new meanings
               in the film; despite being immobile, these were “literally
               talking to each other. They were animated, in a state of flux,
               preparing us to learn their new meanings.”7
                            A few years earlier, on the occasion of her first
               solo exhibition in Lithuania, Prouvost had combined these
               conceptual and linguistic oddities with a bold use of ar-
               chitecture which, with its physiognomy, literally allowed
               immersion in her imagination. In Vilnius, in fact, she had
               presented “Burrow Me” (2015), a hand-dug underground
               cave in the garden of the Rupert Art Center which housed
               a video and a series of objects capable of an absurd nar-
               ration about her artist grandfather.
                            Just to provide another example, one of the
               latest and most famous monumental works – entitled Deep
               Sea Blue Surrounding You (2019) and presented on the oc-
               casion of the 58th Venice Biennale – was conceived with
               the specific purpose of simulating in a very surrealistic way
               the entry into the stomach of a marine animal, ideally an
               octopus. And precisely with the aim of accompanying the
               viewer in “a liquid and tentacular universe,”8 each visual,
               verbal and sound material was conceived to recall another,
               in a fluid game of free associations of meaning and form
               all aimed at erasing perceptive certainties and giving life
               to the abysmal metaphor to which the title alluded.
                            This last work is an emblematic case study to
               understand the characteristic immersiveness of Prouvost’s
               installations, so it is at least necessary to retrace the visit
               itinerary proposed for the occasion. It should be underlined,
               however, that trying to order the elements that contribute
               to the creation of this or other projects by the artist can
               only give exclusively partial results.



      7 N. Haq, “Laure Prouvost’s Lexicon of Ambiguity,” in N. Haq, Legsicon: 9-16, 15.
      8 M. Kirszenbaum, ed., https://www.citedesartsparis.net/media/cia/183726-press_release_
      en.pdf, accessed December 12, 2022.

STEFANO MUDU                                 115                                       AN-ICON
                           Deep Sea Blue Surrounding You

                             Seen from the outside, the French Pavilion at
               the 58th Venice Biennale bore no striking indication of the
               many oddities that would in fact envelop the visitor once
               they entered the exhibition space. Indeed, from a formal
               point of view, the neoclassical temple appeared immac-
               ulate and well structured; it certainly presented no more
               aesthetical connotations than other previous Biennials had.
               The expectation of an ordinary installation vanished since
               at regular intervals the architecture disappeared in a blan-
               ket of artificial fog and the main entrance to the Pavilion,
               under the colonnade, was barred. On the left side of the
               loggia, almost confused with the pattern of the façade, a
               first sculpture appeared which, like a small billboard, had
               specific features and signaling functions. In fact, a sen-
               tence engraved on the stone read “IDEALLY YOU WOULD
               GO DEEPER TO THE BACK OF THIS BUILDING” and in-
               vited you to cross the rich vegetation that surrounded the
               structure to reach the back of the building (Fig. 1). Here,
               the viewer accessed the exhibition space from the foun-
               dations of the Pavilion (Fig. 2): a dark and liminal space
               which, in its being a connoted threshold, sanctioned the
               transition between inside and outside, non-art and art, real
               and imaginary, order and disorder, and progressively ac-
               companied the visitor to immerse themselves in the many
               contradictions of meaning and form that characterize the
               aforementioned “surreality” of Prouvost.
                             In this specific passage area, the first objects
               were delivered to the spectator: masks which, for those fa-
               miliar with Prouvost’s work, represented the first indication
               of a recycling of images, since the artist used them as props
               at least in her video Dit Learn, and perhaps even earlier, in
               some of her early experimental video-performances.
                             As on previous occasions, the iconography of
               the mask certainly alluded to the need of a camouflage op-
               eration with the new reality created by the artist. Perhaps
               it was even referring to the need to cancel the identity of
               the wearer. But in this specific work, thanks to the phonetic
STEFANO MUDU                          116                            AN-ICON
    Fig. 1/2 – Laure Prouvost, Deep See Blue Surrounding You, French Pavilion Biennale Venice 2019
                                 (installation view) © Laure Prouvost, Photography by Gianni Cipriano


              ambiguity of the term “Sea” in the title Deep Sea Blue Sur-
              rounding You – a homophone to “see” – the mask seemed
              to become to all intents and purposes a vision device to
              approach and be able to interpret the abysmal world in
              which visitors were about to immerse themselves.
                            The next room was then conceived as an ante-
              chamber that anticipated the true immersion in the narrative,
              of which it was already strewn with clues. It was dazzlingly
              lit and apparently empty, except for a light blue resin floor
              in which, like on a waterline, various types of objects were
              trapped: from biological remains (such as eggshells, feath-
              ers, dry branches), to artificial materials (such as telephones
              or plastic bottles) and finally small glass sculptures that
              reproduced the shape of animals, often marine (such as
              octopuses, fish and jellyfish) (Fig. 3). These were objects
              from Prouvost’s imagery, which circulate from project to
              project and, not surprisingly, belong to the series she called
             “reliques.” Indeed, as the latter title suggests, these sculp-
              tures worked as traces, as “archaeological” fragments of
              the artist’s design history, and at the same time they served
              as the necessary material for the construction of ever new
              narratives. Objects that Prouvost defines as “Being used
              to help [...] Used to prove something, get the imagination


STEFANO MUDU                                   117                                         AN-ICON
                                                                   Fig. 3 – Laure Prouvost, Deep See
                                                               Blue Surrounding You, French Pavilion
                                                              Biennale Venice 2019 (installation view)
                                                                  © Laure Prouvost, Courtesy Lisson
                                                                Gallery, Carlier | Gebauer, and Galerie
                                                                    Nathalie Obadia. Photography by
                                                                                       Cristiano Corte


                 going. Proof of reality. A small part of a bigger thing, often
                 used by religions.”9
                              After crossing a further threshold – this time
                 a fabric membrane (Fig. 4) – the spectator finally had the
                 sensation of immersing themselves in an abysmal world
                 whose intermediary objects, distributed in three rooms, all
                 referred to the video They Parlaient Idéale (2019), projected
                 on a large screen (Fig. 5).




Fig. 4 – Laure Prouvost, Deep       Fig. 5 – Laure Prouvost, Deep See Blue Surrounding You, French
   See Blue Surrounding You,       Pavilion Biennale Venice 2019 (installation view) © Laure Prouvost,
      French Pavilion Biennale                         Courtesy Lisson Gallery, Carlier | Gebauer, and
Venice 2019. Photography by                                                   Galerie Nathalie Obadia.
               Gianni Cipriano                                        Photography by Cristiano Corte




        9 L. Prouvost, “Reliques” in N. Haq, Legsicon: 245.

STEFANO MUDU                                    118                                          AN-ICON
                            While the filmic work documented with a bi-
               zarre gaze the (initiatory) journey undertaken by the art-
               ist to reach the Venetian lagoon and followed the story
               of different professionals who, in the Mediterranean, deal
               with magic, music or dance; the installation consisted of
               further traces/relics of the film image or other materials
               that mimicked its aesthetics. The space surrounding the
               projection housed the film’s props, but was also filled with
               sculptures in resin, clay, glass and fabric, with plants and
               steam that derived from other projects or recalled their
               aesthetics and temporality (Fig. 6). All together, these visu-
               al materials formed an abysmal atmosphere in which the
               viewer immersed themselves metaphorically and literally,
               conceptually and formally.




                                                     Fig. 6 – Laure Prouvost, Deep See
                                                 Blue Surrounding You, French Pavilion
                                              Biennale Venice 2019 (installation view) ©
                                               Laure Prouvost, Courtesy Lisson Gallery,
                                                 Carlier | Gebauer, and Galerie Nathalie
                                               Obadia. Photography by Cristiano Corte

                           The seats on which viewers could sit looked
               like coral formations, but they also perfectly mimicked
               the forms of the architecture of the Palais Ideal du Fac-
               teur Cheval from which the journey had started – some
               had a riding saddle resting on them to recall the scene
               in which ideally a group of knights starts the film. The
               wrought iron mannequins (Metal Men and Woman, 2015-
               22) were the same as in previous projects, and here they
               wore the same mask used by some performers in the
               film and handed over to the viewer at the entrance to the
               Pavilion. Structures in the shape of an umbrella-fountain
               made of Murano glass [Cooling System (for global worm-
               ing), ca. 2017-2019] inhabited the space after being used
STEFANO MUDU                          119                                     AN-ICON
            as props in a performance that took place in the spaces
            of the Pavilion and throughout Venice the days before the
            opening. Then a large tapestry was conceived as a col-
            lage of images taken from the film which, woven together,
            functioned as a decidedly chaotic storyboard.
                         To put it differently, the filmic work They Par-
            laient Idéale, as if it were the stomach of the octopus
            in which Prouvost wanted to immerse the viewer, held
            together in a truly sprawling way a series of images and
            objects which, like fragments from different provenances,
            came in sequence simultaneously declaring their being
            anchored to different spatio-temporalities and their ability
            to build new entities. All together, so to speak, these ma-
            terials worked as pre-existing entities that united in a new
           “enactment” – an unprecedented staging – conceptually
            or formally multicellular.

                            Diving viscously among objects

                            It has already been noted how this aggregative
               methodology guarantees the most vivacious conceptual
               outcomes to Prouvost’s works – since for the French artist,
               following Breton, the image seems to arise from the jux-
               taposition of different realities and to present itself all the
               stronger the more distant and just the relations between
               them are. And it is also evident that the surreal language is
               used by the artist as a narrative ploy to narrate the complex
               identity and the ecological urgencies of the contemporary
               world, which perhaps needs dreamlike distance from reality
               in order to understand and face its critical issues.
                            Instead, it seems necessary to point out the pro-
               cess with which, within her installations, the artist achieves
               similar outcomes in terms of content. It is necessary to
               describe as far as possible the order in which the various
               visual materials are joined, the artist’s “rules” – if any – for
               the juxtaposition of objects and images in the installation.
                            In this sense, it seems to be of great help to
               use some partial notions formulated in the context of the
STEFANO MUDU                          120                              AN-ICON
              so-called Object-Oriented Ontology or OOO, one of the
              most radical philosophical currents which proposes to
              study reality starting from the role and status of the mate-
              rials that form it, all attributable to the rank of “objects.”10
                            According to the OOO, any experience of real-
              ity would in fact be composed of delimited entities which,
              regardless of their human, non-human, inhuman, animal or
              imaginary nature, join together to create reality of progres-
              sive complexity. Graham Harman, founder of the theory,
              underlines how each manifestation of reality is linked by a
              biographical relationship with the materials that compose it
              but which, at the same time, is distinguished by the emer-
              gence of new and peculiar qualities.
                            Although it aspires to define itself as a “theory
              of everything” and, not without potential systemic problems
              and flaws, it intends to act on reality at all disciplinary levels
             – from history to art, from ethics to politics – the function-
              ing of such aggregation model between “objects” seems
              to have extremely notable repercussions especially in the
              context of artistic production, where the case studies are
              small enough to be analyzed, and where the intermedia
              approach has now led to the coexistence of materials so
              different as to require the intervention of new analytical
              tools to understand the equal importance they assume in
              the composition.
                            In Deep See Blue Surrounding You, for instance,
              architecture, sculpture, video, performance and design pro-
              duce autonomous objects of a heterogeneous nature which,
              however, manage to unite in coherent formal and narra-
              tive agglomerations. Just as the OOO maintains, bodies,
              sounds, images and objects appear as portions of a lexicon
              and, in a more or less elementary way, carry the memory
              of their previous experience in other contexts while putting
              themselves at the service of a new and more complex in-
              stallation. To use a metaphor that Harman himself derives
              from biological studies – and in particular from those on

      10 See G. Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London: Penguin
      Random House, 2018); and L.R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor: Open
      Humanities Press, University of Michigan, 2011).

STEFANO MUDU                                121                                      AN-ICON
             “symbiosis” by the scholar Lynn Margulis –11 Prouvost’s
              installations behave like aggregations of cells that come
              together to produce compound objects that always have
              a degree of structural complexity higher than that of the
              materials that compose them.
                            Moreover, the OOO brings the concept of
              flat-ontology (an equal ontology); every entity of reality –
              regardless of its human, non-human, imaginary nature –
              contributes without any hierarchy to the construction of the
              new compound object. Therefore, as in the most abstract
              philosophy, “humans, animals, inanimate matter and fiction-
              al characters all equally exist,”12 in Prouvost’s installations
              sculptures, video-art, sounds, lights, and even human and
              animal bodies contribute to the formation of an expanded
              composition. Based on the democratic outcomes of this
              confrontation between objects, now the observers feel im-
              mersed in the body of this “phantastic and abstract” animal.
              Acting as a prey inside the stomach of an octopus, they
              lose their identity and become similar to the objects, or at
              least, coexist with them.13 It does not seem rash to argue
              that, in these circumstances, even the spectator appears
              as an object among objects. Moving in space, the viewer is
              led to relate to the objects of the composition, to physically
              embrace the surreality placed before them and, finally, in
              carrying out this operation, to become part of the compo-
              sition, or so to speak, to dive “viscously” among objects.

                                 Installations as hyper-enactments

                             The use of the term “viscous” is not accidental.
               It is in fact one of the adjectives that the philosopher Tim-
               othy Morton – a colleague of Harman and one of the first
      11 Harman explicitly refers to Lynn Margulis’ research, which describes “symbiosis” as “the
      system in which members of different species live in physical contact.” See L. Margulis,
      Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (London: Phoenix, 2001): 7; and G. Harman,
      Object-Oriented Ontology: 111.
      12 G. Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: 55.
      13 t is to point out that the spectators are asked to stay and sit in specific places within the
      installation space. In any case, they assume a particular point of view to watch the videos, and
      they wear a mask to view the objects and the space. This means that they might appear as an
      object among others, following the artist’s intention, but in terms of reception, they might be
      part of a more complex interplay of movements, regards and subjectivity processes.

STEFANO MUDU                                   122                                          AN-ICON
              supporters of the OOO – uses to describe his “hyperob-
              jects:”14 those entities widely distributed in time and space
              which, thanks to the union of portions of smaller objects,
              have become so big, “hyper” indeed, that they are ev-
              erywhere: above and, mainly, among us. In the ecological
              aspects of his discussion, Morton defines as hyperobjects
              concepts such as “global warming,” “the biosphere,” the
             “sum of all nuclear material on earth” and so on: objects
              or phenomena that are “‘hyper’ in relation to some other
              entity, whether they are directly manufactured by humans
              or not.”15 They are therefore very specific entities and ap-
              parently very different from art installations.
                           And yet, his proposal has structural founda-
              tions close to those of the OOO and which are well suited
              to analyzing smaller scale objects such as art pieces; with
              increasing frequency they are created thanks to the use of
              heterogeneous physical or human materials and capable of
              establishing connections so wide in terms of composition
              as to provide the sensation of enveloping the viewer.
                           The composition of Deep See Blue Surrounding
              You is an example of the dynamics just described. Prou-
              vost’s work is not a hyperobject in Morton’s terms (even if
              the environmental issues in which she believes do not differ
              from those addressed by the American philosopher), but
              it can be defined as a mis-en-scène (“enactment”) which,
              due to its degree of compositional complexity can derive
              from the theory of the American philosopher, at least as
              regards the prefix “hyper.” A terminological intuition, the
              latter, which also seems to be confirmed by the words
              used by Massimiliano Gioni to describe the practice of the
              French artist. Indeed, when Prouvost invited him to write
              about it in the Deep See Blue Surrounding You catalogue,
              the Italian curator declared: “she cultivates an excess of




      14 T. Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis,
      London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
      15 Ibid.: 1.

STEFANO MUDU                                  123                                        AN-ICON
               storytelling that flourishes in a constant hyper-connectivity
               of characters and situations.”16
                            The concept of hyper-enactment proposed
               here, in fact, would not only describe a creative stag-
                     17

               ing which, like the OOO, plans to bring together “objects”
               and “references” so heterogeneous as to make a univocal
               orientation among them almost impossible; it would also
               denote a chaotic abundance of materials and narratives
               which, as Gioni also claims, is functional in structuring the
               conceptual surreality desired by the artist. Prouvost’s hy-
               per-enactments are, in fact, “streams of consciousness”18
               where “things are broken and cut. Stories and narratives
               spiral out of control – digressing laterally in a constant flow
               of free associations.”19
                             In this compositional context, as already shown
               by the description of the Deep See Blue Surrounding You
               exhibition itinerary, the viewer moves between the objects
               and the narratives of the stream of consciousness devel-
               oping so-called interobjective links20 and, in a “viscous”
               way, becomes part of them in an attempt to understand
               them. To use the image that the philosopher Jean-Paul
               Sartre introduces in Being and Nothingness (1943) – and
               that Morton takes up again in his work – in these cases the
               spectator experiences the sensation of a hand dipped in
               honey:21 thus merging with the surrounding objects thanks
               to the reciprocal relationships (aesthetic or semantic) es-
               tablished with that material. In fact, it is only this degree
               of extreme immersion that allows the visitor to understand
               the composition and to develop with its materials what

      16 M. Gioni, “Fata Morgana,” in M. Kirszenbaum, ed., Laure Prouvost: Deep See Blue
      Sourrounding You / Vois ce bleu profonde te fondre (Paris: Institut Français, 2019, exhibition
      catalogue): 252-254, 252.
      17 I have extensively explored the subject in the context of my doctoral thesis. See S.
      Mudu, Re-/ Over- / Hyper-enactments: Strategie di riattivazione nelle produzioni artistiche
      contemporanee, a Thesis in Visual Culture Presented in Fulfilment of the Requirements
      for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Università Iuav, Venice (2022). https://hdl.handle.
      net/11578/319396, accessed Decembrer 13, 2022.
      18 M. Gioni, “Fata Morgana:” 253.
      19 Ibid.: 253.
      20 T. Morton, Hyperobjects: 1.
      21 Morton openly quotes Sartre pointing out that “we are stuck to hyperobjects, as if they
      enacted Sartre’s nightmare, ‘the sugary death of the For-itself,’ evoked when I plunge my hand
      into a jar of honey.” See T. Morton, Hyperobjects: 180.

STEFANO MUDU                                  124                                         AN-ICON
               Harman calls “metaphorical relations:”22 the ability that an
               object possesses to identify with another without obvious
               similarities, to join it and, in doing so, to create a new, more
               complex reality.
                             In Deep See Blue Surrounding you the human
               experiences a system of expanded human and more-than-
               human (even imaginary) relationships and renegotiates its
               claims to supremacy and autonomy. By crossing the “po-
               rous threshold”23 of the installation they immerse themselves
               in what Morton calls “symbiotic real:”24 a whole “in which
               entities [human and nonhuman] are related in a non-total,
               ragged way.”25
                             Moreover, it does not seem out of place to un-
               derline how it is Prouvost herself who involves the viewer in
               this diving game. Thanks to the structure of her particular
               video-performance objects, the artist communicates di-
               rectly with the observer using the second person: she asks
               them to follow clues and instructions to reconstruct the
               narrative in which the spectator is immersed; she constantly
               puts them to the test with effects of doubling, repetition
               and manipulation that modify the shape and meaning of
               the entire visual composition.
                             Also using “words and language as found ob-
               jects,”26 Prouvost builds a “hyper-communication”27 that
               accompanies the viewer to abandon the condition of “sub-
               ject” and embrace that of “object”, one among many oth-
               ers around. To put it in the words that the artist uses in the
               aforementioned video-performance Dit Learn, the viewers
               are destined “to become the seat [they are] sat on.”28
                             Using an eloquent image extrapolated from the
               last moments of They Parlaient Idéale (Fig. 7), thus, the
               visitor who approaches Deep Sea Blue Surrounding You
               and other works by Prouvost is required to jump into an

      22 G. Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: 119.
      23 R. Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Politi Press, 2013): 131
      24 T. Morton, Humankind. Solidarity with Nonhuman People (London: Verso, 2017): 13.
      25 Ibid.
      26 M. Gioni, “Fata Morgana:” 254.
      27 Ibid.
      28 Original formulation: “to become the seat you are sat on,” taken from the script of Dit
      Learn, published in N. Haq, “Laure Prouvost’s Lexicon of Ambiguity:” 11.

STEFANO MUDU                                   125                                          AN-ICON
            alternative reality. Here, among images and objects of vari-
            ous kinds, the spectator will abandon the surface of things
           – what they seem to be – to float in a sprawling world that
            helps illuminate what they really are. Or, perhaps, they may
            be in an alternate reality: a sur-reality.




                                             Fig. 7 – Laure Prouvost, They Parlaient
                                             Idéale, 2019, HD Video, 28 min 30 sec
                                            (video still) © Laure Prouvost, Courtesy
                                               Lisson Gallery, Carlier | Gebauer, and
                                                             Galerie Nathalie Obadia.




STEFANO MUDU                      126                                      AN-ICON
AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON.
The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan.



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