Datacomb Area

The future no longer looks bright. It is true: the fan­tasies of moder­ni­ty and the tech­ni­cal utopias they acclaim have noth­ing reas­sur­ing left. They have had their day. Yet there is noth­ing to stop us from ​‘organ­is­ing pes­simism’, as Walter Benjamin suggested.

In his exhi­bi­tion ​‘Datacomb Area’, Erwan Sene lays out the plans and means for a coun­ter­at­tack. One would almost believe he is return­ing from a near but already decayed future, from which he has brought back some cru­cial insights. Sene seems to have entered into con­ver­sa­tion with hawk­ish rulers, who have told him of their hatred for poet­ry; with those who man­age the levers of pow­er and use their con­trol mech­a­nisms to plan the final assault on the last remains of free­dom. Here and there they have plant­ed strange-look­ing machines, like beasts made of met­al and fit­ted with plas­tic cables, lurk­ing on us from rusty street fur­ni­ture.

However, these sur­veil­lance tech­nolo­gies appear to be get­ting increas­ing­ly lost in their own dis­course. They seem to be able to talk only about the milieu of wide­spread fraud, the arti­fi­cial and of pol­lu­tion, which they them­selves have spread and in which they bathe them­selves. They are qui­et­ly becom­ing exhaust­ed, even despite their abil­i­ty to imi­tate the kind of bio­lu­mi­nes­cence found only in the deep­est seas. The flash­ing lights that are the sign of their pow­er and pres­ence grow dim every day.

At the same time, slow­ly but sure­ly the agile and cheer­ful world of dark­ness organ­is­es itself. The land­scape, seem­ing­ly silent and des­o­late on the sur­face, hides in its depths the resis­tance that endures against deplet­ed pow­er. Erwan Sene also reports on this: on secret har­monies that con­tin­ue to rever­ber­ate and strength­en, even though the world is in the high­est state of alarm and engulfed by a deaf­en­ing ter­ror.

Camouflaged and invis­i­ble, the rebel­lion resists, sneak­ing among the shad­ows and adapt­ing to the dens­est dark­ness. This is how it escapes the nets of repres­sion. It tries to dis­ori­en­tate author­i­ty, which claims to be able to see every­thing and there­fore know every­thing. The rebel­lion answers the establishment’s grip over lan­guage with the inven­tion of a new dialect — an unpub­lished and almost unin­ter­rupt­ed bab­ble, a jar­gon incom­pre­hen­si­ble to the con­trol­ling author­i­ties. To hide itself bet­ter, it erects screens mak­ing the sit­u­a­tion more dif­fi­cult to read: crum­pled images, palimpses­ts cre­at­ed by cracks and break­downs, depriv­ing the con­trol organ­ism of its reli­able ref­er­ence points. With its scorched-earth strat­e­gy, it gains ground every hour by let­ting tyran­ny itself sink into the melan­choly it has estab­lished.

With this, a dead­ly tri­umph sud­den­ly changes course as the path towards a vibrant life becomes pass­able again. Where con­trol and sur­veil­lance try to make their mark, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a game always remains, even if it is hide-and-seek. Through his inter­ven­tions, Erwan Sene reveals an amuse­ment park that could well be a memo­r­i­al to the bygone dreams of a tech­ni­cal utopia. It could also be a place for cel­e­bra­tion, where the col­lec­tive sen­sa­tion of redemp­tion con­tin­u­al­ly re-enchants the taint­ed sur­face of life. — Guillaume Blanc-Marianne

ABOUT ERWAN SENE

Erwan Sene (1991, Paris) is an artist and musi­cian liv­ing and work­ing in Paris. He grad­u­at­ed from the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design in Reims in 2016. His work has been exhib­it­ed at Balice Hertling, Paris (solo); SALTS, Birsfelden; High Art, Paris; MO​.CO, Montpelier; CAC Passages, Troyes and Deborah Bowmann, Brussels. His first album and book JUnQ were released by PAN in April 2023.

Kortrijk Art Weekend 2023

During the first Kortrijk Art Weekend, open­ing hours will be dif­fer­ent. More infor­ma­tion about KAW on www​.kor​trijkartweek​end​.be
- Friday 27 October 2023 from 4 pm to 9 pm
- Saturday 28 October 2023 from 11 am to 9 pm
- Sunday 29 October 2023 from 11 am to 6 pm *
* Live Performance by Erwan Sene from 3pm to 6pm

Live Performance 29.Oct.2023

During the week­end of 27 – 29 October 2023 all part­ners will open their doors for the first edi­tion of Kortrijk Art Weekend. For Liebaert Projects this will be the final week­end of Erwan Sene’s solo exhi­bi­tion ​‘Datacomb Area’, Sene will do a live-per­for­mance in the exhi­bi­tion on Sunday 29 October 2023 from 3pm tot 6pm.