LÈA PORRÈ

Generazione Critica: During an interview for ITSLIQUID, you related your role as an artist to that of an archaeologist who “re-enacts artifacts and rituals, lost or imaginary, in which to recreate alternative realities”. Can you tell us in more detail about the parallelism between these two roles and how your artistic practice is expressed through a variety of media?

Lèa Porré: It’s true that I wanted to be an archaeologist for a really long time, and to me, it was about searching for traces, fragments of a tangible past. But also, about filling in the blanks of memory and History, which are both very subjective as their depend on human intermediaries. And so, I became fascinated by this idea of unearthing remains, testaments of a specific point in time. In my own way, over the years, I’ve been excavating online as part of my research, to find elements and symbols that could be re-used in my works. To me, they speak about the collective consciousness of our time, and how transhistorical archetypes and ancient artefacts are currently visualised, especially through tropes in popular / video game culture

At the same time, the idea of authenticity was continuously present in my mind, and I’ve always liked to play with the tension of the real, and what is deemed fake, unreal, unauthentic. I became captivated by the many layers of representation there are in between an original and what it becomes, across generations, and centuries. I always deemed important to embrace those creations along the way, as they too, become part of history, however authentic to a long-lost original they might be.
I’ve always used a wide array of media in my practice, experimenting with different techniques and display, but at the minute, I’m very interested in creating installations. After a period of research, I often begin with the digital process of building 3D Worlds, as a way to appropriate the material I’ve researched and create my own re-enacment.
But at the minute, I’m exploring how to create installations that do not necessarily have a digital output: that don’t necessitate the intermediary of a screen or a projection. I’ve been working on physical works such as wooden sculptures and wallpapers for example, that undergo several digital processes, like CNC, laser-cutting, digital printing, and traditional methods like painting, sculpting, drawing. These recent works behave like portals, entry points towards my Worldbuilds, at the threshold of physical and digital worlds. They too, could be fragments of a lost world.

 GC: Your artistic process immediately made me think of the works of the Poirer couple, who investigate the concept of memory, ruin, archaeology, artifact, memento mori, remembrance, to emphasize the importance of the past on present time and on human behavior. Meanwhile, in your work, the artifact and research as practice become fundamental elements to develop new realities and alternative narrative structures. These new possibilities develop in completely surreal digital worlds. So, what is the relationship between memory, artifact, storytelling, and digital worlds in your work?

LP: Thanks a lot for that lovely reference, the Poirier couple are amazing! I don’t know all of their practice that well, but I am too, very intrigued by remains of the past within the present, as tangible traces such as ruins and artefacts, but also in less tangible forms, through memory, consciousness, ancestral rituals. For me, our Past not only shapes our present, but can also be used to forecast our future. The way I see History is having this very cyclical structure, with events recurring across time, and parallels that can be drawn between two seemingly disconnected events.

My focus on History is specifically until the XIXth Century, and the revolutionary period, both politically with the French Revolution and economically with the Industrial Revolution. I see that time of vivid changes as a fracture in human history, where we go from a cyclical model of life, organised around the time of Nature, to something much more linear, centred around the idea of progress. Ideologically, there is a huge shift before and after that period, there is a true disconnect in how we relate to our Past, which still pertains today: it’s always about how much we’ve evolved from a certain period. When you look at the portrayal of the Middle Ages it’s quite daunting!

In my practice, it’s not about highlighting a Golden Age (closer to a Romantic vision), or negating a whole period, or form of government like the Monarchy, but it’s a critical examination of micro-events, specific rituals, a day, a place, a figure maybe. And that critical lens is needed in order to heal from our Past, but also to better apprehend our future, by learning from our many mistakes. History is very humbling and diving deep into research is a very enlightening way to help us defocus from our current context. I’ve also discussed the idea of re-enchantment, and to me, it’s about allowing ourselves to see beauty in specific corners of History (I’m a huge fan of surreal medieval creatures and bestiaries).

If we think back to the origins of History, that is set in memory, in storytelling, with stories repeated generations after generations, we clearly see its subjective nature, how they are profoundly human creations. Fragments of narratives are woven in different ways each time, and it’s a very dynamic and fluid form. I guess I envision my digital worlds and tales in a similar manner, with bizarre remains, collapsing onto each other, and together, creating a new version of a story told many times, in many ways, across time, generating ‘impossible encounters’ along the way.

GC: Ekpyrosís offers a critical reinterpretation of the French monarchy through a cyclical vision of History, “where its impossible and transhistorical encounters make human and deep time collapse”, as you state in your description of the work. The title comes from the Greek and means ecpirosis, which in Greek philosophy indicates a cyclical destruction of the universe due to a great fire, a cosmic fire, from which everything should subsequently be reborn. The term, therefore, points to a process of renewal following an act of destruction. How was the work created? What sparked your interest in revisiting narratives related to the Versailles palace and the Sun King?

 LP: I’ve talked a little about my interest for the cyclicality of time, and that work was really at the climax of that research. I was very interested in attempting to draw a parallel between the  different cyclical patterns that we find in very diverse forms: the video is set in the time of one day (from Sunrise, Sunset, New Dawn…), looking at the life of a historical figure (the Sun King, Louis XIVth of France), mapped onto the mythological archetype of the dying-and-rising deity, (well-known through the Egyptian God Osiris, a God that is reborn each day, and dies each night) and the life and death of a volcano (thinking about the cyclicality of the geologic scales, spanning across millions of years). That’s an impossible collapse of timescales, yet they all co-exist at once.

 The starting point of that work was researching into the 1783 eruption of the Icelandic volcano Laki, that is a direct cause of the French Revolution (causing many years of catastrophically bad harvest and famine). I was fascinated by how one climatic event could butterfly-effect into this drastic political shift. I became interested in locating a fictional volcano under the Palace of Versailles, heart of French power of the time. As I often like to play with anachronism, I was more interested in bringing Louis XIVth into the narrative, for his association to the Sun, and his draconian daily schedule that mimics the sun pattern, from Sunrise, and his regal ‘lever’ ceremony (getting ready for the day through rigid protocol of power). At that time, I was also thinking of the archetype of the sacrificial king, how a King is linked to society at large and especially the well-being of the agricultural crops, how his divine life is interconnected with that cyclical pattern of nature.

The year that preceded the completion of Ekpyrosis, I became ever-more fascinated by Volcanoes, and geology at large, as an unparalleled cyclical form. Especially how geological strata embed events as layers. That’s the ultimate un-subjective artefact, a supreme remnant of time. And of course, how volcanic eruption site become the most fertile soil after a while, where life stems from destruction — as we find in the Greek idea of the Ecpirosis. Finally, an ongoing research in world-wide mythology led me to a strong interest in cosmogonies:  mythological tales that narrate the creation of the world. Again, we have this emphasis on cyclical time, and what specifically absorbed me here, is that cosmogony and apocalypse myths are often one, destruction is creation, as the start/beginning has no linear point, we are in the midst of constant chaos & rebirth, where one cannot exist without the other. All these wide interests caved in altogether in this video work, and I built the different 3d Worlds as an Axis Mundi, one realm of on top of the next, in the Gardens of the Palace of Versailles!

Léa Porré, Ekpyrosís, 2021, Video still, courtesy the artist

CG: Ekpyrosís, like your other works, relates to the practice of worldbuilding, i.e. the process of creating a fictional world, including its architecture, geography, characters, relationships, stories, and so on. Ian Cheng, for example, uses the expression worlding to describe his world-building process and approaches the concept of World by describing it as “a container for all the possible stories of itself”. At the same time, relevant to your work is the notion of the archetype, through which we identify psycho-cultural models of our collective imagination. Can you tell us about the relationship of these two elements in your process of creating digital experiences through virtual worlds?

LP: These worlds that I’ve been creating over the years, I call them my ‘dreamscapes’. Worldbuilding allows me to create these impossible environments, that are made of my interests, fetishes, peculiar axis of research, and don’t obey to laws of the real world, where real/unreal, sacred/profane don’t have to be so opposed. These imaginary landscapes have that surreal atmosphere and, because I have a highly symbolic practice, I always add in fragments of archetypes, so I hope to create uncannily familiar spaces. Worlds that feel at once foreign and close, I call this tension ‘Earthly Alien’.

 I’ve been really focused on the mnemonic, the memory technique used by the Ancient Greeks. Their strategy was to build ‘memory palaces’ in their mind, really visualising a building and knowing it perfectly (I believe it could be either a real or imaginary place), and then store information at specific places within those palaces. Then, all they had to do now was to walk through it (in their mind), and recite their speech with the help of the stored information off the walls, as you would with a post-it note nowadays I guess. Such an impressive exercise, at a time where writing was devalued. But I realised that the way I was building my 3D Worlds was pretty akin to that, and that my works function as memory palaces in their own way, using Worldbuilding to store archetypes and hopefully triggering memory. Even though these works often end up as Videos, I’m always really excited to be able to show them physically, and to continue creating even more immersive installations, bringing that hyperreal nature to a tangible display. It’s amazing that this show, Rabbit Hole, can be viewed 24/7, from the street, as it really becomes a gateway within the city.

Léa Porré, Ekpyrosís, 2023 installation view, Metronom IT

GC: Your works are referred to as “memory palaces,” and one of the common threads that unites them is a type of aesthetic that relates to the concept of “ruin porn,” a popular trend especially on platforms such as Instagram, and used as a hashtag by millions of users to describe photos in which architectural and urban ruins exert extreme fascination. However, the theme is also recurring in other contexts, from movies to TV series, but especially also in video games, in which the construction of often even post-apocalyptic landscapes relies on the concept of ruins as a sort of memento mori for a time and a civilization now gone, collapsed, wiped out. I find it interesting that you are working in the direction of researching ancestral myths and an artistic reinterpretation of historical memory using digital worlds, rather than projecting yourself on the construction of hyper-futuristic worlds; especially at a time in history when the study, at different levels, of virtual reality and AI is changing many sectors, from the industrial to the creative.

LP: Thank you very much for that, it’s much appreciated! I must admit I sometimes ask myself that same question, why am I looking (mostly) towards our Past, when everyone else seems absorbed by the future? Maybe because I see time as cyclical I don’t have such a strong distinction between timescales, or maybe as I spend so much time enchanted by volcanic creatures, forms of life that are millions of years old, that looking at our upcoming couple of decades doesn’t seem that exciting? If looking backwards is having 4 billions of years of Earth-time to investigate… that’s pretty enticing!

Well actually, if it is crucial for societies to know their past, it doesn’t mean it’s only about looking backwards, quite the opposite! We have a lot to learn from past societies, especially when you think of our current ecology disaster, military threat that is capable of annihilating the whole planet. I think it’s a pretty useful tool to be able to look at different pasts, — especially with human History as we know (or pre-history if you prefer) expanding ever-more backwards in time, or rather how we finally grasp that our timescales expand much further than we thought we knew — and to create alternative scenarios from all that knowledge. Storytelling, creating myths, building worlds, have been key society-shaping elements for millenia, and now, — just as it was completely redefined with technology shift such as writing, and printing, — we have the possibility to create incredible whole new worlds digitally, thanks to current technologies, so it’s very fascinating for me to be able to blend archaic beliefs and archetypes into our current context, within those digital worlds.

You could also argue that it has some hints of nostalgia or romanticism; that impossible goal to deeply connect with our past. We see that trope a lot in video games such as Assassins Creed, how to live our own ancestral memory that is within our DNA. And in popular culture at large, we see a lot of medieval imaginary blending into fantasy worlds, like Games of Thrones or Lord of the Rings: there is a true craving for that re-appropriation of our Past. For now, I use Worldbuild to fill the gap of that impossibility, but especially as a way to fill the imaginary, to embrace the blurred notion of real / unreal, to make distant times and faraway places collapse in one.

GC: I would like to dwell on the more technical aspect of your work and ask if you can tell us about how you create your digital worlds. Do you use game engines like Unity or Unreal? How do you put the various pieces together?

LP: Thank you for that question, I think it’s very important to demystify the process behind the making of works, especially by artists who use digital processes! So yes, I use Unity to create environments. In those worlds, I add found 3D models, I also custom-make some by freelancers, or I sculpt some in ZBrush or Blender. I of course always have reference images in mind because my narrative often embed real historical places, but the World starts to become interesting as I drift further away from those references. My aim is never to make hyperrealistic sets, — we have the “real-world” for that, — but they do tend to look a bit more surrealist, or hyperreal.

What is always very important to me is that this process of 3D environment building is somewhat rendered visible in the end images or videos, that the making is always referenced,  because for me, that’s the point of using a specific medium: that its very unique abilities are highlighted. When you build in 3D, you often (aka all the time) have issues in scales, elements that are flat (2D), others that are 3D, errors and glitches along the way. And that’s where it becomes interesting, it’s the unplanned mistakes that you make along the way that make it worthwhile, and also why I haven’t really outsourced this process to professional digital designers who put the focus on the high quality, on accuracy. I realised that embracing my amateur-ness made it a much nicer, and more unique, and bizarre process, in which I learn a lot! To me, constructing digital worlds becomes interesting when you can do what you couldn’t do “in real life”, by blending meshes together, combining architectural, geological and human elements in one. I often shoot videos (or images) within Unity, edit them, and sound in Premiere, and any effects/text in After Effects. And finally, as I’ve mentioned before, for me the work is finished when it’s installed because it draws on physical places, ruins, fragments, remains etc… It’s the end of what I call the feedback loop, because when I build worlds, they are 3D, they are physical, they aren’t flat images, so it’s important that the audience can engage with them in a physical manner.

Lèa Porré, Ekpyrosis, RAC Degree Show, 2021, courtesy Ollie Harop

GC: So far we have talked about your research as related to the creation of digital worlds, but this work on historical and ancestral memory is actually expressed through other formats, such as photos and videos, but also tangible artworks extracted from these realms. This creates a complex macrocosm consisting of various media and aesthetic layers. How does the process of translation of your artistic oeuvre into other formats take place?

LP: So to continue on what we’ve discussed previously, I don’t consider myself a digital artist, and if my works have many digital steps and processes within them, I want to bring this digital realm visibly into the physical sphere, and to create immersive environments/installations and objects. It’s an interesting process for sure, and recently I’ve enjoyed conceiving wallpapers; they function as doorways in the exhibition space. For Ekpyrosis (that is featured in Rabbit Hole), the original installation was developed for my MA Degree Show from the Royal College of Art at Cromwell Place, in London in July 2021. The video was displayed on the screen, and was surrounded by 3 sculptural elements, that each referred to different realms that you can see in the video. Their forms are influenced by the Rocaille period, a time of total exuberance and freedom in shapes in the middle of the XVIIth Century, in France, with a high emphasis on fantasy. So, I really like that these sculptures are both made with digital processes but references an older cultural period! More recently, I’ve been working with wood elements, frames that contain digital images from my Worldbuilds, but that I painted and varnished by hand, so they too have that nice in-between of different times.

GC: The period of the French Revolution, the empire of the Sun King, and the historical and cultural role of the Palace of Versailles play an important role in your practice, as well as in the work selected for the Digital Video Wall. Are there other historical periods or other mythical personalities that caught your attention that you would like to investigate next?

LP: So, I’m French, but my true roots are from Brittany, the North-West region of France (that faces Cornwall in the UK), that remained independent for a long time, and kept its own indignity and culture pretty strongly. It’s one of the 6 regions considered as ‘Celtic Nations’, now living in London, UK, for 12 years, I feel ever-more close to that heritage, and yet intrigued by it. Brittany is known for its incredible megalithic culture; Carnac for example is a 7000 years old perfect stone alignment site. So I’ve been drawn to that more archaic and Celtic landscape, to these monumental fragments of a culture we know so little.

For a while (couple of years) I’ve been thinking of ice, and cryo-preservation. Before current science established that the Earth was getting warmer, we thought for a while that the future of our planet was icy. So it’s a project that could become an interesting apocalyptic counterpart to Ekpyrosis!

But as always, there will be lots of bizarre elements out of time, space, and scale.

16/03/2023

Léa Porré, Ekpyrosís, 2023, installation view, Metronom IT