After the Natural, the Graft. “Artificialis”: Laurent Grasso at the Museum d’Orsay

The Museum d’Orsay hosted the last installation by Laurent Grasso, a film called Artificialis, within the exhibition The Origins of the World: the Invention of Nature in XIX century. Artificialis is a research project aimed at narrating the transformations adopted by man to modify nature by conforming the space: the mutations and evolutions enacted by humans change their spatial references, updating the language of project with transcriptions, neologisms, experimentations. The images of this cinematic narrative are derived from the geographic – satellite domain, a semi – authorial method confirming the ubiquity of acquired by the human eye thanks to technology. The exploration no longer concerns the physical position of the subject performing it, but rather the relationship of density between the images reproduced as virtual apparatuses, which cannot be univocally decoded. The field of investigation highlighted by Grasso fits transversally into an open path, at the center of which lies an equation to be unlocked: the balance between ‘natural’ and artificial affects the dwelling of the present and the future. From this landscape, do canons and codifications emerge that affect the project? From Grasso’s work the paper intends to analyze the relations of coexistence between ‘natural’ and artificial, in the landscape of post – natural as a set of future artificial laws. The link between human and non – human leads to unprecedented operations of exploration and advancement, whose relationship emerges already in the contemporary among the subtle anticipatory meshes of art. If the Artificialis’ images are memories of the future, then can the moves deployed by Grasso be revelatory of signs through which to pre – figure the project to come?