Maybe the only way utopia can emerge is from the ashes of dystopia. It’s only in destruction – as imagined here at White Cube by young French artist Marguerite Humeau – that new life can flourish.
She’s combined sculpture, AI, craft and insect science to speculate on a future built on collaboration, to imagine a society that works together like a little universe of human termites.
It starts sedately enough with a mural in Peckham. Humeau asked AI platform GPT3 to reimagine Adam Kossowski’s soon-to-be demolished mural on the Peckham Civic Centre, a paean to human cooperation and endeavour, using at its starting off point a rare butterfly in the corner of the image. The result is now a storm of striated wings on sheets of stuttering ceramic, part digital ant farm, part mid-century smudgy abstraction. It’s not especially thrilling or interesting visually with its big swathes of muddy, faecal brown, even if its ideas are neat enough.
The installation that follows is great though. It’s a dark netherworld filled with distant tribal sounds and chirping insects. Dotted around the space are curving mounds of alien but wholly organic sculptures. They’re gorgeous, imposing works. There are huge stacks of layered honeycomb, extruded blobs of fleshy clay, glass cacti and metallic flowers. Were these made by human hands, or insect palps?
The answer is both. This is humanity reimagined in the image of ants and bees and termites, cooperative societies that build together, live together, work together. Humeau is presenting a path out of the impending, unstoppable destruction of our world, a path already treaded by our insect neighbours. It’s about cooperation, coexistence, survival, and honey. If we follow that path, the future could be pretty sweet.