Cradle of the World

2023

Cradle of the World is an immersive panoramic painting installation created in 2023 as part of the Residence - Fabrique Fondation Fiminco in Romainville. The artwork consists of seven painted bed frames suspended by braided ropes. It confronts the viewer with the effects of the Plantationocene and its neocolonial practices on the current state of the world. Cutting through the bed slats are depictions of animals and peoples representing colonies or former European colonies that are currently experiencing ecological and human devastation.

The project begins in the foundations of the Chaufferie with ceramics alluding to land plunder, deep-sea pillaging, and the contamination of destruction. It then reaches the third floor where we are embraced by the semi-circular paintings that narrate the story of the necessary inter-species collaboration, the urgent consideration of the effects of 21st-century colonial practices on contemporary society, and the imaginative vision of a preserved natural environment.

Writings under the bed, by Daniel Nicolaevsky Maria

Mother Earth is a gaping wound. For the era of coffee, sugarcane, and cotton plantations, we began devouring the riches of our planet like insatiable parasites. Transatlantically parasitizing our brothers and sisters with chains and handcuffs. Planting endless fields to feed the masses, in exchange for the plundering of fertile lands. Leaving behind an arid and devastated landscape. Constantly razed forests, poisoned rivers, and the Indian Ocean turned into a garbage dump. The price of our voracity is the destruction of our common home.

No more sand, no more forests, no more butterflies or primeval forests. America and the Caribbean have become the imagined projection of the European mind, but the new world comes from the destruction of the old. The plundering of the Earth breeds successive diseases and the loss of natural resources. Rivers and seas die every day in the name of the legitimacy of power in the regime.

The cage has become the world and the world, the void.

So we find ourselves trapped between two temporal layers, one past, and one future. Insidiously trapped in a well-known archaic knot, yet rooted in the present moment. We only see through a narrow slit in the horizon a future to rebuild.

Intellect, spaces, and even spirits are now political affairs and properties of destructive states. Bodies and souls trapped in a world imposed upon them by the paranoia of the former power. From its loss of legitimacy, its loss of strength. The weight of new lands, created from the ruins of the old world, weighs upon us.

Let us hatch a new world, complete and whole, no longer fragmented, no longer half alive. Colored.

Understanding the importance of every human and non-human species, visible and invisible. To bring out of its entrails the keys to a legitimate home for all living things. But are we capable of overcoming the anthropological pessimism that drives us to collective apathy?

How can we not submit to the contamination of ongoing destruction and gain the upper hand over our minds and imaginations? Turning to the power of the common, of rest and dreams, to create together, our home.

Would it not be simply human to overcome difficulties and reinvent ourselves from our inner emptiness? Have we not survived the pandemic of the century here? Capable of wandering through this slit. The real future of the world we want to build seems close.

Profit through the idyllic exoticization of the global South, with its religious promises of a fictional Eden, has deliberately excluded and oppressed indigenous groups through state mechanisms that have benefited regional and transatlantic colonial powers.

Illegally sold wood from Guyana and Brazil has the ironic destiny of creating parquet floors in North America and fuels the ready-made industry in Europe, transforming forests into garden furniture and bedding accessories. If modern constructions have the power to build time, does the origin of natural resources build mansions or coffins?

The deconstruction of these categorical symbols of our society reveals the fragmented and fragile nature of the visions held by nation-states and institutionalized religions. But what are we really building? We are trying to move forward together toward the creation of an ecological society, and this reality overwhelms us. However, our preconceived and closed ideas will not allow political progress. We must avoid building a lifeless society, but why are we walking in that direction?

How can we avoid the destruction of cultures?

Our origins are beyond our control, yet we possess the power to determine our future course.

We need to re-establish our role as caretakers of our atlas, embracing together the oneiric imagination while reconnecting with a past whose future will have been cut off at some point in our history. Using the forms of collective reflection and mind-earth systems that we cultivated long ago to build our own terraforma. Listening to the whispers of our niche and honoring its rhythms, its cycles. Understand that we are in the same cycle as an open-eyed butterfly, settling on other roots, sowing life to progress toward its transformation cycle.

Technical Specifications :

Assistants

Marcelo Porto

Eliote Bizarro

Melina Barbault

Non-human collaborators

Pabllo & Pixel

Design & Graphics

Anthony Clergue

Sound Creation

Alonso Martinez

Many thanks

Elizabeth Pélereaux

Yann Namuroy

6bis Fabrik

The Fiminco Foundation team