Pépite et Josèphe | Laboratory
Summer 2024
This summer residency-laboratory is an opportunity for the duo Pépite & Josèphe to reflect on a body of work for their exhibition project Les créatures de la route en Estrie, to be presented in summer 2025 as part of the Mission photographique de l’Estrie (in collaboration with the Rencontres de la photographie en Gaspésie).
Les créatures de la route en Estrie
Imagining, ⎯ from rusted fragments collected on the bangs of the main roads running through the Eastern Townships ⎯ an alternative reality where the vehicle is an archaic being with a metal frame. Then, reconstruct the imaginary of the road based on creatures invented by artificial intelligence.
Clearly, walking on the margins of the road makes us realize the precariousness of the human species in the face of speed. The choice of this mode of travel confronts our contemporary lifestyle, clearly marked by social acceleration.
In collaboration with sound artist Xavier Madore, the artists plan to create five articulated creatures whose squeaks will be captured, transformed, amplified and broadcast in real time. Inspired by shadow theater ⎯ rich cradle of many myths around life and death ⎯ the duo will also work to reproduce in the gallery the phenomenon that marked their walking experience “when at dusk, the light from car headlights casts the silhouette of our moving bodies into the ditch”.
Finally, Pépite & Josèphe will use artificial intelligence technologies to design a form of uchrony that features these living carcasses, which will be assembled from car parts found in the region and then contextualized in landscapes both typical and significant of the route. This alternative history of the road, in which mythical beings once roamed the Eastern Townships, aims to nourish the region’s imagination. It also extracts the romantic, poetic and narrative potential of our road trajectories to imagine a world where these monumental infrastructures, brazenly affixed to the expanse of the territory, would have a different meaning than that of dominant productivity.
📸 Self-portrait of the duo Pépite & Josèphe during a pilgrimage along the roads of the Eastern Townships, photographic archive, spring 2024.