Damien Jibert
Plague - Installation - 2018
présentée dans le cadre de l'exposition Panorama 20
Installation
These little, pixelated characters are nihilists of the worst kind, because such is their lack of belief that even the end of the world is denied them. This virtual city in which they exist is a pretext for seeing them endlessly arguing and being bored. Nothing that is said in these stories should be taken seriously, for a nihilist should never be taken seriously, even when the apocalypse seems near. I absolutely do not approve what they say and clearly distinguish my own ideas from theirs.
The world presented here is linked to real time, it is an autonomous virtual space of a looped week, in which we can move around and give up a bit of our everyday life, with no guarantee that the experience will make us better. A video game with no real purpose, or ergodic literature, what we call it hardly matters, as long as intertwined stories come into existence in this space that teems with archetypes of anxious individuals, against the backdrop of this plague that takes many different forms, forms which are sometimes reassuring and sometimes make us despair.
Damien Jibert
Damien Jibert, born in 1989 in Dijon, (France) graduated from EMA Fructidor, Chalon-sur-Saône (France) in 2014 (visual arts). He lives and works in Lille (France).
Damien Jibert creates a universe half-way between cinema and the digital world characterised by a lo-fi aesthetics and black humour. He explores ways of articulating narratives out of fragmented fictions peopled by unusual, almost naïve characters, struggling with difficult realities and their own loneliness. Jibert’s work has been shown at the Hors Pistes festival at the Centre Pompidou, at the Mulhouse Biennale and at the Gaïté-Lyrique in Paris.
Production
Acknowledgments
A big thank you to the team at Le Fresnoy and to everyone who gave me input and feedback when I was developing the project, and also to Pablo Albandea and Clément Brugger for their precious help.
