LISIÈRES (EDGES) AT THE EDGE OF BODIES, AT THE EDGE OF THE FOREST Bruno Albizzati, Lucile Boiron, Anne Commet, Dana Fiona Armour, Bruno Gadenne, Laura Garcia Karras, Vincent Laval, Juliette Minchin, Alice Grenier Nebout, Lucile Piketty, Raphaëlle Peria, Sarah Valente, Ittah Yoda A proposal by Yvannoé Kruger

Stories often start on the edge of the forest.

From ancestral myths to children’s tales, the clearing is the place where one stops for a moment to try to perceive, through the branches and the vines, the beings that live there and those, like mirages, that our mind invents.

Entering this forest, buried memories, immemorial fears and dreams, popular traditions, more recent myths and symbols arise on the back of its clearing. Crossing its territories, at the bend of its trunks, where Siberian shamans or Armorican druids hide, artists also make mysterious incantations. They tell stories that allow us to access their worldview, which they transmit to us through their paintings, sculptures and performances.

Once we get out of the wood, we make out another border, the skin, a tighter, more strangely intimate land. The skin also hosts an entire fauna, invisible now. The mouth and the eyes are its clearings, openings that dive deeply to swallow the world and scrutinize it. The edge of the body, it has thousands of minuscule, padded entrances in its odorous pores. It separates the inside from the outside, it protects and makes vulnerable. It is also the deepest part of us. Because the epidermis is made of the same stem cells that make up the nervous system.

Despite this original separation, the skin doesn’t forget that it is the sister of the mind.

And it reminds us of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, at the turn of another forest.

The skin and the mind are like two lovers kept at a distance forever, but secretly connected. Skin-deep. As if the inside had risen to the surface. To caress the skin as one would caress an idea.

– Text by Yvannoé Kruger