2017
Paper, wood, cement, lamp
As part of Dominique Peysson's artistic residency at Espace Jean-Roger Caussimon in Tremblay-en-France, in partnership with Lieu Multiple, the DNA school and the Ebi-Carbios laboratory in Poitiers and supported by the Seine-Saint-Denis Department and the Ile-de-France Region.
DNA in plastics was exhibited from January 5 to March 10, 2017 for the Première Impression exhibition, consisting of 5 of my works on DNA.
Four biographies
I wonder here about what is called dyslexia, too often considered a weakness. Mutations, which are at the origin of our evolution and our ability to adapt to our environment, aren't they errors in reading the sequences A, T, G, and C of our DNA? Isn't the mutation a kind of dyslexia of our reproductive system, a saving dyslexia? Because without reading errors, there is no evolution...
People categorized as dyslexic would be unable to read the succession of ATGC letters that make up their genome without producing reading errors. These would be errors, it is true. But if we consider the long process of evolution, these misreadings are rather called mutations. A rather positive term, if the mutations are of natural origin. In short, if nature never produced reading artifacts, there would simply be no evolution. Because it is the spontaneous departure from a given position that allows the multiplication of possibilities, the resistance to potential illnesses and other difficulties of our life to come. Who tells us that it will not be dyslexia which, in the future, will allow those who are endowed with it to have globally superior capacities to those who do not benefit from it? Do we know what their capacity is to think about complexity, for example? To manage a multiplicity of information at the same time and to link them? Why think of dyslexia as a disgrace (preventing us from getting them into the nails) without even thinking of also looking at the benefits it can bring?
I imagine in this work what would be the transformation of a person's genome, if nature were dyslexic... There are a thousand and one possible reading errors: confusion between consonants (such as sound consonants (b, d, g, v, j, s) which are sometimes replaced by voiceless consonants (p, t, k, f, ch, s); Inversions of letters, syllables, certain words; Omissions or additions of letters, substitutions, contaminations (directing/directing, landing/paper), the eviction of punctuation, and all the possible combinations of these variations around the same text.
So I imagined a book, which would contain the list of letters defining the genome of an average man, whom I called Bernard. Then I introduced into this succession of letters some reading errors. I did this little exercise four times, each time with a different type of error, and gained four pounds.
Four different individuals therefore, all derived from the same person by genetic mutation. Each is called differently, Bernard's name having been transformed by dyslexic operations to give birth to Inès Brenard, Hugo Berrard, Paul Barnard and Enzo Dernard. Their first names are all in four letters, like the four letters ATGC. One woman for three men, since there are three times more dyslexic boys than girls.
In the end, the original genome, our average individual, no longer appears. Only a reconstruction by comparison between the four text-genomes would make it possible to come back to it… As well as the name of Bertrand.
