Antoine Renard : Psychobotania

PSYCHOBOTANIA is a video, sound and olfactory installation designed specifically for the Galerie of the Cité des sciences et de l'industrie. The project is a continuation of my research in the Peruvian Amazon. There I studied the way in which plants, through their perfumes and ritualised shamanic uses, influence the social organisation and identity construction of local populations. In a perspective of hybridization and decolonization of modernist thought, my research is situated between vegetalist animism and technological naturalism. PSYCHOBOTANIA summons a set of immersive cognitive and physiological elements, like so many visual, sound and olfactory documents from my multiple stays in the jungle. I have remastered and hybridized them using algorithms fed by elements of popular culture, such as images from the animated film AKIRA or the underground electronic music of my adolescence. It is a drift into an interiority, an experience conducive to the exploration and infiltration of my unconscious by following the meanders of plant knowledge.

 

Antoine Renard