Maarten Vanden Eynde's practice is embedded in long term research projects that focus on numerous subjects of social and political relevance such as post-industrialism, capitalism and ecology. His work is situated exactly on the borderline between the past and the future; sometimes looking forward to the future of yesterday, sometimes looking back to the history of tomorrow. Currently he is investigating the influence of transatlantic trade of pivotal materials like rubber, oil, ivory, copper, cotton and uranium, on evolution and progress, the creation of nations and other global power structures, in order to assemble and construct a speculative future history of the material traces we leave behind on Earth.
Oulimata Gueye is a critic and exhibition curator and works on digital cultures. Among her fields of investigation, she explores the place of science on the African continent and the potentials of fiction as a space and tool for analysis and projection, the questions of racialisation and gender in digital technologies, as well as African initiatives that consider technology and science from a perspective of non-alignment with dominant models and reappropriation of the means of action.
These two artists will lead together the project Ars Memoriae during their residency at the Cité internationale des arts.
This project takes as its starting point the little-known Mesolithic site of Fontainebleau and is anchored in a broader research on the material forms of memory and the contemporary challenges of archaeology, particularly with regard to the place it has given to the African continent where the oldest remains of human presence on Earth are to be found. By studying different ways of remembering, it will be a question of imagining / speculating on / what could be the material vestiges that would survive contemporary society in order to propose an alternative historical narrative.