Nathalie Rey

In the novel by Pierre Boulle, The Planet of the Apes, and then the movies that were inspired by it, the question is raised of who wins whom, between man and ape, according to the criteria of the theory of evolution. Quite a relevant question when we think of the natural tendency of humanity to self-destruction.

I will start from the (ironic) premise that the inversion of human domination on the animal world has once been or is still possible, in a remote context beyond our imagination. In this reflected world, the owners of the technology would be animals. Each animal would have a computer and would be connected to all the other animals via the Internet (it would be an absolute nightmare indeed, since we can register 2,000 billion mammals only).

Initially, the work Millennium Monster II was motivated by other concerns, namely the possibility of creating a monster in the image of the unrest and fears of the contemporary society, which could have a cathartic virtue. At the time of the conceptualization of the work, I emphasized some phenomena that were particularly interesting to me, such as the excesses of the consumer society and the supremacy of the new model of pop culture made in Japan.

On the occasion of this collaboration with the research platform "The Internet of animals", I again stab my voodoo monster in order to face the vertigo implied by the suction of the different space-times in a single giant magma of relationships and information. As always, by sense of propriety, and by convention (erroneous, according to which animals are more ferocious than humans), I choose animals to illustrate my fables...

The work in process The Igloo of Barneo is born of similar reflections and fulfils its cathartic function through the image of the house and shelter. In fact, it appears as a kind of antithesis of Millennium Monster II, the latter being threatening when the first is reassuring. However, the Igloo of Barneo comes together with its modern fable, no less absurd.

With these random searches of mine on the Internet (!), which make me travel through a storm in the Pacific in the 90s to a concentration camp on the outskirts of Paris after the Second World War, I recently got to the Russian camp of Barneo in the North Pole. This scientific base works above all as a tourist destination for millionnaires looking for adventure and includes some heated tents with wifi and an airstrip on a piece of ice floe.

In thousands of years, when the last men who will have survived their own predation will be held captive in reservations and the animal world will have supplanted them in the competition for progress, the situation of the isolation of polar bears and seals will cease at last thanks to the miracle of the Internet.