Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet (FR)

°1981 / °1981

The artistic practice of Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet centres on the act of narration. Their stories bring together historical facts, fiction and new realities and take the form of films, installations and performative conferences – a mixture of lecture, performance and conference. Their mode of operation combines scientific discourse with personal comments and is described as an ‘archaeology of knowledge’. They have been working together in Paris since 2000.

A Treatise on Baths (2013) 

installation with slide projector, 9’ 

A Treatise on Baths is a 35-mm slide projection based on research into various historical facts. They include the story of a nineteenth-century colonel who was frozen in ice, the discovery of several Gallo-Roman ex-voto sculptures in a hot spring and a method the Incas used of freeze-drying potatoes. The related performance considers the practices, risks and fantasies associated with the conservation of living organisms – human, animal and vegetable. 

The Waterway (2013)

video, sound, excerpt, approx. 5’

This film is set in a holiday resort on the Atlantic Ocean in France. A group of underwater archaeologists are looking for the remains of old shipwrecks and try to protect what they find from corrosion. A spa resort offers its clients seawater treatments as a rejuvenating cure. And a mysterious group of senior citizens tries to find a remedy that will give them the right to eternal life. Does the future of humanity lie under water? In a typically associative way the artists combine events which seem only to relate indirectly to a pseudoscientific story.

Produced by the Liverpool Biennial as part of the cooperation project with the biennials of Göteborg, Ljubljana and Mechelen (within the framework of the European Culture Programme 2007-2013).