Hadrien Téqui
La Colonie P. - Installation - 2019
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 21
Installation
Viscous yellow material continues to be generated during the exhibition. It is a multi- nucleic unicellular living being nicknamed “the blob.” If it is to stay alive during the exhibition, it must be fed, watered and cared for. Its food – oat flake pellets – is distributed by a mechanical feeder. To keep it from proliferating outside the installation, quinine tablets are laid out to mark the frontiers of this living form’s world. As the hours go by, so the oat flakes become the home of fungal cultures that threaten the blob’s health. To prevent the whole culture from becoming infected, the infected part of the blob must be amputated. Since it develops across two rotating trays, the tray containing the infected blob turns over and discards the infected matter. The food is then distributed on the tray that has become empty and the blob starts to take over this new territory. This cycle is based on a precarious equilibrium in which the blob could, at any moment, either disappear, or escape from the framework provided for it. The machine given the task of maintaining this equilibrium must not fail, at the risk of imperilling the integrity of the installation.
Hadrien Téqui
Born in Nantes in 1993. After passing my baccalaureate I started a fine arts degree in Angers in 2011, then an MFA in Lille in 2014. I obtained my master’s in 2016. It was when working on this degree that I developed a practice centring on installation, video and sculpture. I then chose to pursue my research at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains, where I enrolled in October 2017.
