Nous sommes Lichen
Pascale Gadon Gonzalez
Curated by Jean-Marie Dallet
Exhibition from May 15 to June 17, 2023
Pascale Gadon’s research focuses on ecology, in the sense of oikos logos, a science of habitat and interactions of living beings with each other and with their environment. Which leads him to look at hidden worlds. For the artist considers, like many of his contemporaries, that what we perceive on a macroscopic scale becomes something else on the scale of nanotechnologies, even though we look at it with the same eye. What relationships can one then perceive in this passage from one world to another? According to Gadon, the molecular dimension would lead us to reconsider the notion of the individual. At the origin of terrestrial plant life and any organic form would therefore be a mutualistic process: symbiosis.
From the microcosm to the macrocosm, lichens send us back the image of an ontological coming and going, 'the other' is at the heart of what makes life.
ISEA 2023 is a major event on the global scene of digital creation, aims to strengthen the dialogue between artists, researchers, engineers, designers, entrepreneurs of cultural and creative industries. This 28th edition of ISEA has the theme of symbiosis. The exhibition by Pascale Gadon is part of this year’s satellite events.
"Since 1995, I have been using photographic processes to vividly represent lichens that I collect in series still under development. The lichen is a multiple being, it does not have a center, it results from the symbiotic association of partners, generally an alga and a fungus.
The symbiotic process of lichens simultaneously exposes two levels of organization. What is 'individual' in it? Process invisible to the neophyte but which nevertheless generates variations in structures that are perceptible (fruiting body separated from the fungus: apothecia). While the symbiosis is complete and the two structures are exposed separately under the microscope, nature allows each of the two individuals to reproduce separately, it presents only a unitary vision. Under these conditions 'one' has a complex identity (multiple and one at a time).
So can we consider the lichen as an in-between understood between "identity and otherness", as a metaphor of interdependence, as revealing a symbiotic ecosystem?
This new paradigm prompted me to see the living differently, to question the forms that such ecosystems can take. Symbiosis is above all an encounter, it is achieved through biological diversity as a potential novelty, it is in reciprocal exchange that this new form of the lichen is structured. Scanning or transmission electron microscopy allows us to observe the diversity of symbiotic postures in lichens. As a photographer, I wanted to capture these images of contacts, abuts, braces, arrangements, organization within the lichen world.
Symbiosis involves possibilities that are not predetermined or calculated. As Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing* points out in her book The Mushroom of the End of the World, "arrangements are always open gatherings. They allow us to question community effects without having to assume them. [...] Arrangements do not only bring together lifestyles; they make them.
Pascale Gadon-Gonzalez