PRESS RELEASE

MARGUERITE HUMEAU
Mist
June 15, 2021 – September 15, 2021

What if non-human beings are not just spectators ‒ witnessing the world’s slow motion destruction? What if they, too, mourn their dead, and weep for the extinction of other species? What if global warming is triggering the birth of spiritual feelings in non-human beings?

Humeau has heard tells of whales beaching themselves, embracing death by suffocation under their own body weight for no one else but themselves. Dolphins, too, committing mass suicide ‒ tired of the sea and life therein. Chimpanzees are piling up rocks ‒ apparently building some kind of temple. Reindeers are self-inducing magic mushrooms, reaching states of ecstatic trance. Elephants wave branches at the waxing moon…

While some of these behaviours seem to be ancient, their number and complexity have increased in recent years. Mass extinction seems to be making animals more conscious of their own mortality; making them hope for some form of existence after death… Clear distinctions between animal and man (indeed, between nature and culture) are blurring. MIST descends:

A cold moon, seen from the below the newly risen sea, casts pale light throughout the space. THE MOON illuminates the exhibition’s uncanny scene, where the earth has partially sunk beneath rising floodwaters. On land the air is thick with an invisible layer of toxic gas. It is here that mutant denizens of MIST live out their attenuated, half-conscious days. Reduced to living-death, these creatures are mere lungs, tracheas ‒ respiratory organs ‒ slowly mutating into industrial waste.

A marine mammal is suffocating (THE DEAD), facing the sky. Another one (THE PRAYER) is lifting its body up, searching for some form of transcendence, perhaps invoking celestial bodies. A group of half-submerged beings (THE BREATHERS) look on, performing a breathing sacrament, as if to vouchsafe the former’s passage into another realm through a personal offering to the lunar deity ‒ projecting ocean water and whale mucus, sourced during a research expedition off the west coast of British Columbia. All the while, an invisible entity (THE MYTH TELLER) is heard moving throughout the entrails of the building, narrating the first non-human myth of a future deluge. Behind a wall, a large wave seems to have left various disembodied respiratory tracts (WASTE) lying on the shore. In another room, at the back of the gallery, we enter the deep sea. In this ocean a shoal of fish (THE DEAD, THE DANCERS, and THE AIR) are performing a non-human dance, to resuscitate one of their dead.

As Joseph Campbell tells it ‒ the recognition of mortality and the requirement to transcend it is the first great impulse to the birth of myths and religion. MIST envisions a world in which mass extinction has accelerated to a point of no return; where non-human beings have become spiritual, capable of self-transcendence and mystical experience, because they have no other choice. It is as if promethean punishment (the trauma of reason) were visited on them for humanity’s crimes in the pursuit of planetary mastery.