Anima, an immersive multidisciplinary installation by French visual artist/photographer Noémie Goudal, theater director Maëlle Poésy, circus artist Chloé Moglia, and composer Chloé Thévenin, reflects on the history of the earth’s climate.
Their collaboration that premiered at the Festival d’Avignon in 2022. This year, the piece was performed in London in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall for three sold-out performances in July 2023, and at the 2023 Venice Biennale. Now, it makes its first – and only – North American appearances at PS21.
Weaving elements of visual arts, photography, music, cinema, and acrobatic performance, the piece alters our perspectives on the “sensation of time,” provoking new perceptions of the pace and effects of climate change and its future. ANIMA is informed by the artists’ fascination with recent discoveries by paleoclimatologists, who find concrete evidence from the remote past—fossils, pollen, carbon atoms—that allow us to understand today’s landscapes and form hypotheses about the planet’s climate past and future.
Photographer and visual artist Noémie Goudal‘s practice involves the construction of ambitious staged, illusionistic installations centered on landscape, which she documents in film and photographs and into which she incorporates performance. Her interventions are grounded in research into the intersection of ecology and anthropology, in particular paleoclimatology, the analysis of climate and geology from the perspective of deep time, to explore the earth’s past and future.
Her work has been presented at institutions and events in France including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Les Rencontres d’Arles; Festival d’Avignon; and internationally at the Tate Modern, London; Kunstverein Hildesheim, Germany; Ballarat International Foto Biennale, Australia; Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle, Switzerland; The Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki; FOAM Museum, Amsterdam; Whitechapel Gallery, London; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Lisbon; and the Horniman Museum, London. Goudal’s work is held in public collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; David Roberts Art Foundation, London, UK; FOAM Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, France; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India and many others.
Actor, writer and director Maëlle Poésy is Director of the Théâtre Dijon-Bourgogne, Centre dramatique national. She appears often at the Festival d’Avignon, Lincoln Center, and the Festival TransAmériques and has directed, among other works, 7 Minutes at the Comédie-Française, Glory on Earth at the Théâtre de la Cité Toulouse and Théâtre en mai festival (Dijon), and the short film Sans sommeil.
Chloé Moglia is a French trapeze aerial artist, choreographer, and dancer and founding director of Compagnie Rhizome, whose research focuses on the concept of suspension and weightlessness. Called “the artist who explodes the boundaries of the circus,” her choreography plays with bodies, slowness, the laws of physics, and vertigo.
Parisian DJ and musician Chloé Thévenin creates work ranging from techno to confessional downtempo and blues-influenced indie rock. Her experimental, cinematic solo albums include guitars, intimate vocals, and abstract song structures. As a DJ, she spins at clubs and festivals around the world, including Le Pulp and Lumiere Noire in Paris. She also composes classical music, soundtracks, and scores for art and dance pieces.