What if the emblematic figures of the official history of humanity were born elsewhere than where they were born, and had lived different lives?
(Ft. Che Guevara, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Margaret Thatcher, Jacques Lacan, Louise Michel, Lenin, Simone de Beauvoir, Marcel Duchamp, Nina Hagen, Frida Kahlo, Mao Dze Dong, Andy Warhol, Karl Marx, George Bush Jr, Sigmund Freud)
Transincarnations (2023) is an ongoing project that started on the occasion of the exhibition When ideologies become form, curated by Chrystelle Desbordes at Xanadu gallery, Imera, Marseille.
In the World-System as we have known it for several centuries, Machinization and Fantasy constituted the main means of appropriation of the forces of production by those in power. Nowadays, Machine Learning and Fake have become democratized at a speed unprecedented in history. Anyone, equipped with a digital device, can use AI to imagine alternative realities and carry out political fiction experiments.
But things are not that simple: reality resists, and our political history cannot be twisted in every direction. Transincarnations is freely inspired by the theory of the French demographer and anthropologist Emmanuel Todd which links family structures and ideologies. By relating the elementary family structures to the infamous “political compass meme”, the project remixes the supposedly well-ordered ideological patterns of our media horizon, in order to draw parallel histories and question their legitimacy. The first results were a series of deviant photographic portraits of iconic figures in world history, as well as some preliminary research drawings, that will be further developed.
The preliminary version of the project was released on April 18, 2023, at Xanadu gallery, Marseille, in the exhibition When ideologies become form, curated by Chrystelle Desbordes. The exhibition took place during the workshop Fragments of Utopias, a joint event co-organized by Professors Olga Dror (Texas A&M University and Collegium-Institut d’études avancées de l’Université de Lyon) & Gerard Sasges (National University of Singapore and Imera, Institut for Advanced Studies (IAS) of Aix-Marseille University / French Institutes for Advanced Study Fellow):
Here is the talk I gave at the end of the workshop, just before the visit of the exhibition When ideologies become form
Christophe Bruno 