This speculative fiction is situated in 2062. A digital rendering of the iconic Québec actress Luce Guilbeault is 127 years old (in reality Luce Guilbeault died in 1991 from cancer). She chronicles how in order to increase workforce productivity every person on the planet now undergoes a mandatory anti-aging treatment that maintains the body as though they are 25 years old. But, in order to control overpopulation, at 65 years old, their bodies turn to dust. Within the same introspective monologue, she also considers how her life as an actress, captured on film, will contribute to her own immortality.
A series of fossil animations unfold on one wall. On its reverse, the actress playing the actress in the animation details her life, creating a suggestive if unclear tie between acting, memory, artistic projection, and fossilization.
Both videos are science fiction works about the distant past or less distant future. In one case, it is that of the speculative scientific claims of the origins of the every day, and in the other of the science fiction re-imagining of a banalized figure of pop culture suspended in a green screen eternity.
The imagery is computer generated, and Tremble has constructed a pastiche of post-digital documentary aesthetics that has no real indexical, only a post-hoc representation generated from a set of representations. This applies to both the depictions of origins and the depiction of the zombified and resurrected actress, not craving brains but blubbering like Hamm in Beckett’s Endgame if he was trapped in a permanent TV pitch instead of his bunker.
The videos of Abiogenèse feel very much like leftovers from a Canadian TV production that would otherwise last a few seconds. There is a lava lamp quality to much of the aesthetics when they get stretched out like this, allowing for a continuous and colourful series of small differentiations. As a set of shifting colours, patterns, and rhythms, it is quite enjoyable and likely would have had a substantially greater dramatic force with its minimal electronic soundtrack if these aspects weren’t swamped by the audio from the other video.
The extreme asymmetry of their presentation makes the far stronger and more substantial four-channel video play a role bordering on the supplementary. Sound takes on the same part of super-positioning as the figure to the background. This suppression of the atmospheric to benefit the narrative does, however, give the exhibition a comic quality that neither work possesses strongly on their own.
This also warps the two works into one, as though one has intercut two sections from different episodes of a lengthy film series. In effect, this seems quite haphazard. Not providing enough to make any sense of a gap to be filled between the disparate parts, they sit together with a certain indifference, regardless of how synchronized the times of the four channels may be.
Like Jessica Eaton’s recent show, the generated material is largely concerned with a vaguely familiar world that doesn’t exist. In that case, there was something bordering on a mechanical inhumanity at play, tinged with an occultic retrofuturism, but in Tremble there is an almost overwhelmingly maudlin quality that is only alleviated by the implied (if subdued by its presentation) scope that reveals its humanism to be a triviality.
Julie Tremble - Abiogenèse : des étoiles aux momies from DAZIBAO on Vimeo.