State of Concept
Athens

As part of the second episode of Waste/d Pavilion, this dialogue between artist Elsa Brès and art historian Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou is the second iteration of the Bona-Fide series of exhibitions dedicated to contribute to the promotion of young artists and critics/curators. Brès presents Notes for Les Sanglières, shot in the rural French region where she lives, which deals with wild boars as allies, inspired by the ideas of ecofeminism. In her text Mavrokordopoulou, a researcher on the subterranean imaginary in contemporary art, especially with regard to nuclear spaces, shares her thoughts on Brès work in relation to ecology, in the fundamental sense of the term as the interaction of organisms with each other and with their environment.

Bona Fide #2 

Notes for Les Sanglières is a short film about a longer film in the making. This preparatory sketch focuses on the boar, an animal that has enjoyed many media appearances as of late. Packs of boars are routinely depicted wandering in urban environments, from bustling cities to barren exclusion zones around sites of nuclear disasters: peeping in trash bins, looting abandoned homes, attacking people on beaches. The film probes the alliance between boars and humans, troubling narratives of human exceptionalism. To pursue this improbable collaboration, Brès works her way through different representations and significations of the wild boar, ranging from its current status as an unwanted domestic intruder to its painterly variation as a symbol of virility in hunting iconography. The film is about imagining our relationship to the natural world otherwise, deploying the wild boar not in its essence but in its uptake, in its potential to open our imaginations to other forms of socioecological relationalities.

Waste/d Pavilion is part of State of Concept Athens’ new research chapter ‘Coalition of the Care-full’, a project of the European Pavilion, an international programme of the European Cultural Foundation that brings together art and culture initiatives that encourage critical thinking and radical imagination,  and fuel bold perspectives on Europe and our common future. It unfolds through a series of “episodes,” focusing on different thematics: labor, body, ecology, and language. Artists, researchers, and scientists from Greece and abroad have been invited to present different conceptualisations of the notion of Waste/d, through various ways of viewing, circulating, and developing methodologies for an anti-Waste/d front.