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The Loot Bag Theory of Fiction
Exposition collective
Ars Electronica Festival 2023 - Campus Exhibition
Avec : Nicolas Bailleul, Vincent Bonnefille, Angelica Ceccato, Lorena Lisembard
2023

The question of truth in contemporary times leads us to consider issues of power ownership in a globalized,  stacked, and suffocating world: who owns the Earth and what circulates on it (information as well as goods), to create the big narratives in which we live in? Through practices of gleaning on the Internet as a renewed attention to the small, the leftovers or the details that lies behind a décor imposed as truth without alternative, our proposal is articulated as a manner of « faire avec »  (Citton, 2020). « Faire avec » can be translated to “doing with” and implies a methodology in action within a system. That's when the word “loot” came up in our discussions. From simple screws to legendary weapons, “loots” generally refer to video game collectibles often at the root of its value system. In that sense, we wish to question objects or data collection by becoming collectors ourselves. In the gesture of the gleaner or the ragpicker, there is the action of bending down to keep what is left behind (grains of wheat after the harvest, if we focus on Millet's painting, for instance), but also of giving another life to discarded or obsolete objects. With five artists and researchers from Paris 8 University, we have imagined the exhibition The Loot Bag Theory of Fiction, a direct reference to Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction in which she suggests that instead of weapons, bags and containers are the first survival objects in human history (Le Guin, 1986). In our bags, you will find the looted objects we have gathered and want to relocate outside of their original territories, to draw alternative paths within an imposed system of truth. After an initial show at the Ars Electronica 2023 Campus, this mobile exhibition is now being redeployed at 229.

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Credit photo : Nicolas Bailleul

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