Laure Prouvost opens collaborative project at Mercer Union, Toronto

28 November 2019

Laure Prouvost and artist and writer Jonas Staal are co-administrators of ‘The Aube’s cure Parle Ment’ (read: “Obscure Parliament,” or, “Dawn-Cure-Speak-Lie”). ‘Obscure Union’ is the second assembly resulting from their organisational endeavours, and opens on 7 December at Toronto’s Mercer Union. Read an excerpt from the exhibition's press release written by the artists below:

Be Realistic, Demand the Obscure!

We invite you to attend the inauguration of the Obscure Union by the Aube’s cure Parle Ment: a gathering of octopus, plants, signs and breasts as well as support structures of different materiality. Once founded by artists in 1979, Mercer Union will now welcome a gathering of other-than-human comme comrades on a ride that seek new modes at odd of unionization against radical call precarity In no rarity, neoliberal libre of extractivism of material, climate mate, cat catastrophe and present real reality as determined by such comun conditions.

What is experienced end inhanced as obscure at l’aube’s cure is that which undermines the written and unwritten rules of consensus, and can be as bees provoked through unscripted encounters between the world’s manifold many folds constituents tourne tourment. In Obscure Union the familiar liar becomes radically unfamiliar liar, de-stabilizing fizzing the perceived structure of reality to declare rare the obscure as a site of meaningful political call for action. In this commun condition, words, worlds, objects and behaviours as yours gain a multiplicity city of meanings and agencies, leading to a disintegration of life-thread-threatening, normative narrative regulatory modes of being. It is through this necessary corp collapse of the structures that in black currents terms currently haunt our increasingly uni uninhabitable world, that new maud and modes of unionization, new forms of comradeship sheep become imaginable.

Gleaning from the historical alliance of revolutionary humans and revolutionary objects inn Russian constructivism, Obscure Union will expand and deepens on this morphological call-heritage to redistribute agencies sea amongst various other-than-human comme comrades. Referencing this history her story through lingering linguistic and structural rural play, it ask: what does it mean to leave with and through the obscure cure as a found foundation of political assembly and (cultural) unionization? Through an intensive lessive, ongoing program, Obscure Union will address urgent questions of earthly survival, such as other-than- human rights, the founding of zoöpologicalcooperatives, the liberation of the fossil from fossil fuel, in order to develop infrastructures for a politics of deep futurity. Jonas Staal and Laure Prouvost