OFLUXO

The underground is an ambiguous universe populated by humans and animals developing on the margins of life on Earth. Swarming in the bowels of many megacities, the Mole People bear witness to our societies’ multiple disturbances. They make the underground an island to populate, a sprawling city where the forbidden and the unknown mingle. Mirroring the world “upstairs”, these forgotten creatures embody exile and marginalization. It is precisely the secrecy of these communities that has made them the acting body of a post-apocalyptic world.

To summon the bowels of the Earth is to fantasize about the hybrid creatures that inhabit it. The Mole People remind us that humans are also animals. The molehill is both a refuge and an escape, a place that exists independently of the social order. This exhibition asks “how does the imagery of the tunnel, dark and damp, propell the imagination of contemporary creation?” Its multiple subjects—the apocalypse, the darkness, the return to the wild state—are all ways of testing our relationship to animality. The cave is seen as a “secret matrix” where protean works unfold. They speak of organic life, of periphery, of myths and of onirism. Together, they draw the new cartography of a cavernous space where the need to make community is told.