The duo Rometti Costales has been invited to present their work in the context of the seminar "Something You Should Know – artists and producers today" organised at the EHESS in Paris by Patricia Falguières, Elisabeth Lebovici, and Natasa Petresin-Bachelez.

From 7pm to 9pm
Maison des Sciences de l'Homme
16–18 rue Suger 75006 Paris
(Odéon or Saint Michel metro)

Created in 2006, the aim of Something You Should Know is to bring contemporary art into a higher education and research institution, while placing the focus directly on the practices of today’s artists and producers.

This choice is precisely dated: the fall of the Wall and globalisation shifted the flows and polarities of the art world, and gave rise to new forms of activism, new collective ambitions, new “deviant” ways of questioning norms. Examining spaces, types and forms of political representation or the composition of new national references stemming from the communist world or from decolonisation, placing utopia back at the heart of collective projects, questioning democracy’s majority legitimacies and blind spots: these are so many motifs for art today. The seminar proposes to explore them by giving the floor to artists, curators and critics who, working outside France, are coming to the EHESS /MSH so we can share in their experiences.

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In their multidimensional work, Julia Rometti & Victor Costales read nature as a space of political inscription. With their proposition, the wild is read as a territory of dissent, as a manifesto of determination and legitimacy. Rocks, flowers and insects become actors of a ideological and metaphysical battleground. The rocks wander through an illusionary space, and simultaneously inhabit the specificity of, versus the impossibility of, location. The bibliophagic insects’ excavations in a geology book create a bookworms perspective on natural sciences, themselves being part of the book, of the library, of Jerusalem, of Palestine, of the universe. Here the insects affect the study of geology the same way geology affects the comprehension of land, space and its representation. The artists thereby pursue the issue of perspective, which they render visible in their works by means of transpositions, translations, repetition and recurrence, permutation, imitations and transfers.