Here are the dragons, 2019
On the occasion of a cycle of three exhibitions entitled “Here are the dragons” (Ici sont les dragons) at the Maison Populaire de Montreuil, Louise Desnos was invited to carry out an original photographic work which resulted in this series of images. Each part is marked by an emblematic advertising slogan: Because we are worth it, Come as you are and Just do it.
For the “Because We’re Worth It” cycle, Louise Desnos created “Medusa”. This assemblage made of garbage, a wig and plastic flowers evokes the artificialization of the world, our fascination for the reconstitution of reality and the consumption of the fake. Medusa, we think of course of the continents of plastics that are born on the oceans; it is also the gorgon that stares at us, from whose gaze we cannot escape; it is both a testimony and a testament: ours, what we are going to transmit.
For “Come as you are”, Louise Desnos questions in a triptych entitled “Borders”, the theoretical foundation of globalization: the free movement of goods, capital and people. But when confronted with the border, do they circulate as freely and with the same transparency?
Finally, for the third and last exhibition, she summons in “Triumph” the bestiary of laziness, opposing the capital sin to the myths of work and performance. Her snails, invading an icy office universe, displace its functions: staplers, mice, screens become playgrounds, rockers, snail trees as cats have theirs. Laziness, as a reappropriation of a temporality of its own, becomes a form of emancipation, of lucidity, of resistance.