Connivéncia.

Elsa Brès’ films and installations highlight forces of resistance at work in the contemporary socio-natural landscape. At the crossroads of research, storytelling, and experimentation, her work, which is often collaborative, takes root in “frictional” terrains like the rural, mountainous Cévennes region in southern France where the artist lives and works. Connivéncia at La Loge is her first exhibition in Belgium, and brings together works produced as part of a film project that began in 2020. Entitled Les Sanglières, a neologism that feminises the term “wild boar”, the unreleased feature film–and the chapters that follow from it–turn to the forest mammal as an ally in the antipatriarchal, anticapitalist struggle. The exhibition is conceived as a prologue to the film. It expands its content by playing with codes of cinema and the status of images–from nature documentary to vernacular film by way of the costume drama–through different systems of monstration. The artist, trained in architecture and inspired by ethology, examines the birth and persistence of systems of territorial appropriation and control through the lens of human and nonhuman relationships. In the Cévennes forest, the fiction she and her accomplices propose opens a breach: a space for speculation and interspecies communication that shifts the gaze and accentuates the imaginary.

The heart of many stories and legends, the wild boar embodies the duality of a species feared yet admired for its strength. Many heroes of antiquity, like Hercules in The 12 Labours, hunted down the “wild” animal to prove their bravery. On the other hand, Lorenz Frølich’s illustration (1895) of a famous 14th-century Norse poem illustrates the alliance between gods and animals. The goddess Freyja rides on the boar Hildisvini, her protégé Ottar’s avatar, to go to the giantess Hyndla to convince her to recount her ancestors’ story. Despite the mythological infatuation with the wild boar, a combination of factors linked to modernity, like its ever-increasing demographic population, has contributed to the animal’s association with danger. Perceived as game, a “nuisance”, and an invasive species, it causes agricultural and urban damage through its incursions into private property. On a vertical screen, an Instagram feed created by the artist scrolls images as funny as they are tragic of the animal trapped outside its natural environment. They evoke an abundance of clichés and misunderstandings surrounding its “wild” representation fuelled by the media. The confusion with its cousin, the domestic pig, reminds us that the biological construct surrounding the animal is as much cultural as it is political.

Echoing the historical and international context surrounding the wild boar, the digital map at the entrance–with its slow, colourful movements–repositions Connivéncia in the more specific territory of the Cévennes, “a [mountain] country like no other”¹ . The map was produced using new cartographic technologies like Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in partnership with the geographer Gherardo Chirici, and its purpose is to determine habitable zones for the species. Developed from the animal’s point of view according to environmental variables such as distance from buildings and water points, the calculation tool cross-references data to generate pixels indicating areas suitable for its evolution. By combining geography, technology, and art, Elsa Brès proposes a new approach to the forest and its inhabitants. This interface embodies the search for a common language and possibilities of cohabitation, and also writes the fiction of Les Sanglières in the exhibition and for the characters we discover in the film. It is used for the tracking operations that appear in the next room, and then again in the work on the 2nd floor.

On one of the temple walls, infrared surveillance camera monitors show black-and-white, close-up images of the animals, whose eyes seem to glow in the dark. In the interstitial spaces between the forest and construction or shopping areas, the images are a reminder that wild boars are often active at dusk or night, resulting in accidental encounters with humans as they are pushed out of their habitat zones.
The idea of captivity is turned on its head when one of them suddenly engulfs the camera. The animal, disregarding the object that seeks to control it, annihilates the idea of private property that the camera symbolises. The synchronisation with the images projected onto the central canopy takes us subjectively through the animal’s eyes (forming the term “boar-centrism”), which is nearsighted with poor colour perception. The raw sound is a mix of hissing and huffing, creating a disconcerting closeness between the group of walkers, visitors, and the animal.

The second floor installation forms a diptych, weaving a temporal link between the histories of the Peasant Revolts, the appropriation of the communal properties, and contemporary interspecies alliances attacking private property. In a future close yet indeterminate, the group decides to join forces with wild boars to organise an uprising. The drums of Meryll Ampe’s music lend an epic yet sensual dimension to the action. The parallel sequence takes place in the 16th century, a period that resonates with today’s political and ecological struggles. In these scenes shot on 16mm film, Elsa Brès imagines a coalition between two characters who left northeastern Europe after the failure of the Bunschuh revolt (the German Peasants’ War started in 1524) and peasants preparing a rebellion in the Cévennes. They read an Occitan version of the Twelve Articles; the original version translated here is said to have been supported by Thomas Munzer (1489-1525), a politician and preacher who contributed to the uprising against enclosures and the private use of land. Fencing off plots of land and hindering their open use meant the end of the communal system, which was responsible for the impoverishment and marginalisation of the workforce, particularly women, as Silvia Federici recalls in Caliban et la Sorcière.

In the triangular space on the first floor, posters created in collaboration with Brussels graphic design studio La Villa Hermosa present 8 of the Twelve articles in Occitan. The Akzidentée typeface design, with its stamp-like effect inspired by collections of peasant pamphlets, retains the roughness of the original translation, as the artist imagines the geographic and linguistic wanderings between Germany and the Cévennes. Interviewed through the prism of gender, the Sanglières transcend the generational and historical divides of capitalism to consider the interdependence of minority histories that are often silenced or forgotten. The very title Connivéncia, the translation of connivance in Occitan, calls to mind the tacit understanding and signs (in the landscape, through footprints or burn marks in the landscape; through tattoos on bodies) of recognition at the origin of the new alphabet that connects the Sanglières community. In the valley where the artist lives, and in collaboration with all the nonprofessional actors in the film, their language has gradually seeped into reality and tinged the future with a coming insurrection, like an activist orientation guide:

“They say they’ve learned to rely on their own strength. They say they know what they stand for. They say that those who claim a new language first learn violence. They say that those who want to transform the world first seize the guns. They say they start from zero. They say that a new world is beginning.” - Les Guérillères, Monique Wittig