From 10 October to 29 December 2024, La Criée centre d’art contemporain presents Biomimetic Stories, an opus in augmented reality by artist Pierre Jean Giloux. At the crossroads of documentary, science and science fiction, Biomimetic Stories projects new links that could develop in the near future between the city and nature, technology and biology. Combining real and virtual images, the work is divided into four forward-looking fictions, set in four Indian cities.

One of the big questions raised by the climate crisis is what can science and technology do? Can we still trust technology, can it still help to construct the future, or has it become, with its unbridled acceleration, mere smoke and mirrors? The debates are heated, in both the scientific and artistic communities.

It was one of these scientific debates that gave rise to Pierre Jean Giloux’s new opus: during a residency in India, he had the opportunity to attend the «Metagreen Dimensions 2020» conference organised by the Trivandrum College of Architecture. The conference highlighted and identified the climatic, economic and urban planning challenges facing India, and presented some of the possibilities offered by biomimicry. Pierre Jean Giloux was captivated by this intersection of utopian thinking, the living and futuristic technological advances in relation to urban development. He subsequently collaborated with Indian and French laboratories to develop Biomimetic Stories.

Each of the four films that make up Biomimetic Stories explores a particular dimension of urban utopia.

For Maduraï, Pierre Jean Giloux drew inspiration from architect Mike Pearce’s research on termite mounds and Frei Otto’s research to design a neighbourhood protected by metal shades. These are designed to capture dew and create lighting from bioluminescent bacteria. Here is utopia in the making.

Dholera focuses on the smart city of the same name. Begun a few years ago, this urban project is currently at a virtual standstill, and the artist shows us a sort of ghost site: here, the ruins of the future fissure utopia.

Pirana Dump Yard is the only film in the tetralogy composed entirely of real footage. It shows an open-air rubbish dump on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, a mountain of waste that is slowly smouldering, but at the foot of which people live; no utopia, no future here.

As a counterpoint to this hellish reality, in BioluminescenTTower – whose main architecture is a virtual replica of Le Corbusier’s Tower of Shadows in Chandigarh – architectural utopia becomes the place where scientific realist utopia is implemented.

Alongside these four films, the exhibition also features a remarkable collection of the artist’s storyboard drawings, a soundtrack which connects the exterior and interior of the building, and a selection of the extensive documentation gathered by the artist to develop this project, all of which shed light on its prospective dimension.

Presented in the form of an immersive multi-screen and sound installation, the work questions the relevance of human and societal organisations in an increasingly urban world. More broadly, it raises the question of desirable futures.

The Biomimetic Stories exhibition will be presented in spring 2025 at Le Botanique in Brussels, with which it is co-produced.

Biomimetic Stories will also be the subject of a publication in 2025 by La Lettre Volée.