Title: Monolithe
Artist(s): Fabien Léaustic
Source: Neural Magazine
Sense(s): visual, smell?, installation, visceral
Issue(s): ecosystem support, socio-ecological relationship
This work is a visual, but presumably smelly installation of a living artwork. In this piece, a large block of stone is covered with a phytoplankton, monumentalising it. The phytoplankton is alive, it develops over time, and it produces oxygen in the immediate surroundings.1 This ‘affects the visitor’s environment’, but rather than in a destructive way, is in a ‘saving biological nature’ (ibid.).
While not concerned with visibilising environmental data per se, it is a work of interest in that it connects the beneficial effects of what may be conceived as inconsequential organisms, with the audience’s lived experience of the exhibition. Therefore, I contend that it somewhat bridges the gap between the alienated experience of societal life, with that of the myriad organisms in the natural world that benefit human life on the planet.