DOCUMENTARY
Learning from aping is an experimental project about apes, cognitive sciences, cultural transmissions and mimicking...
“ Learning from Aping certainly seems to occupy a special place in my work as a whole, you could compare it with what Deleuze describes as the advantage of being a stranger within one’s own language. But this series of works is not fundamentally different from the rest of my practice, even if I have to admit that in this case I am granting myself greater freedoms because my sphere of activity, one could call it a pretext, lends itself so wonderfully to experimentation. The project consists of extensive documentation – I am compiling a library specialised in apes, and collecting articles and objects from everyday culture – and also a very free interpretation of all these phenomena from a point of view that sometimes verges on the pseudoscientific or even pseudoartistic.
Learning From Aping offers wonderful possibilities for play, even my own artistic autonomy/authorship is thrown into question. Sometimes I feel like a character that I have invented myself. This is the role I also play in the film that is currently being made about this research. I often ask myself how I position myself as an artist, but there’s no way I could say. I ape art, I think, if not deliberately. I can’t seem to do anything else. "
Extract from an interview with Tiphanie Blanc and Yann Chateigné