THE ELEMENTAL is an art center with a multidisciplinary program of exhibitions and events, aiming to create connections between art and the environment, with a focus on the developments of Earth & Land Art, BioArt, and Sound Art.
A Contemporary Art Center in the California Desert
Housed in a large industrial building, THE ELEMENTAL was created through a partnership between the LAccolade Foundation - Institute of France and Epicenter Projects, founded by Coachella Valley artist Cristopher Cichocki. It was inaugurated on February 12, 2022, in Palm Springs with its inaugural exhibition, titled “The Gaia Hypothesis - Chapter One: Earth, Fire, Water, Air,” which brings together pioneering artists of Earth and Land Art alongside contemporary artists.
This contemporary art center was designed to present and produce exhibitions, performances, as well as art books and editions. The center also aims to host artists through the LAccolade Foundation’s residency program. These residencies will, in part, be nomadic, in relation to the landscapes of the American Southwest deserts.
Exhibitions
Chapter Two ; Chapter Two 2.0 : PALM TREES ALSO DIE
March 2 - May 25, 2024
This exhibition is dedicated to the Cahuilla Nation, protectors and stewards of the Oases in the Western Deserts.
Palm Trees Also Die is the second chapter in THE ELEMENTAL's inaugural cycle of exhibitions. The aim of this cycle is to develop the visual, sensitive and performative writing of a collective, imaginary novel dedicated to the Gaia Hypothesis. According to the hypothesis formulated by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis at the dawn of the 70s, Gaia is the name given to the Earth defined as a living, self-regulating super-organism that maintains a positive balance for life. With the Gaia Hypothesis, we are invited to reconsider the ways we inherited from Modernity of understanding and thinking about the environment. What's more, we are called upon to think differently about living things, to understand the subtle interdependencies that link all their components. The Earth is not the backdrop to our actions, but an actor in human history in its own right, never separate from us, whatever the Moderns may think. Gaia, as a living organism, reacts to our actions in a set of "feedback loops", as climate change and environmental disasters perfectly illustrate. We are linked to the Earth and we must understand her fragility, which is in reality, not hers but ours.
After our first chapter dedicated to the four fundamental elements, the Palm Tree is the subject of the second chapter. This exhibition has a strong symbolic dimension, given the location. Indeed, the Coachella Valley is the birthplace of the only palm tree endemic to the California deserts: the Washingtonia Filifera, or Máwul in the Cahuilla language.
© Christopher Cichocki
The Gaia hypothesis Chapter One ; Chapter One 2.0 Earth / Fire / Water / Air
October 15, 2022 - January 21, 2023
October 15, 2022, THE ELEMENTAL opened an expanded 2.0 presentation of The Gaia Hypothesis - Chapter One: Earth / Fire / Water / Air - the inaugural exhibition that launched in February with works by Cristopher Cichocki, Laura Grisi, Helen Mayer Harrison & Newton Harrison, David Horvitz, Caroline Le Méhauté, Angelika Markul, Ana Mendieta, and Radenko Milak.
The newly amplified 2.0 version of the exhibition brings forth additional artworks by Francis Alÿs, Alice Aycock, Aaron Giesel, Marie-Luce Nadal, and Benoît Pype. This iteration will conclude the first chapter in a cycle involving the collective, visual, and performative writing of a curated visual novel that deals with Gaia’s intrusion.
About The Gaia Hypothesis
Formulated in 1971 by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, the Gaia hypothesis postulates that the Earth is a living, self-regulating super-organism reliant on a subtle relational balance between all its components. This premise is an initiation to inhabiting the world with the awareness and sensitivity where being a part of a living whole can never be reduced to the sum of its parts - as this whole can only be experienced through the interconnection of relationships.
This first chapter examines the Gaia hypothesis by testing it against the four fundamental elements: Earth, Fire, Water, Air - culminating into an interdisciplinary presentation that will include an international array of 14 artists featuring seminal works of 1970s Earth Art in combination with a new generation of artists that address the complexity of elements and natural forces that sustain our living, continually shifting environment in the face of climate change.
© Christopher Cichocki
Sara Favriau
Sara Favriau questions both the artwork and its ecosystem; its circularity. She convokes forms, symbols and processes of a popular nature in order to transpose them, and through which sculptures, installations, performances are in dialogue: a hut, a pirogue, a bow, a tree, voguing... are elements that are part of her formal and conceptual vocabulary and carry their own dramaturgy, their poetic enactment. It is an encounter between past, present and future that Sara Favriau has been developing for years. How the past and its heritage, linked to progress and discovery, how these three temporalities, their specific methods, can be - by their pooling - singular. This crossbreeding is at the heart of her intentions: to interweave metamorphosis, fiction, and essay, either in a simple form or essential actions. Like a pirogue-tree that crosses a sea to find a forest. A work that is being renewed, and through this questions its sanctuary status (exhibition, acquisition), towards a possible status of the living (evolving work, re-enacted, transformed, altered…). A virtuous mixture that she also approaches with humour, whose poetic form, which is dear to her even in the titles of her works, is a force for proposal.
Sara Favriau is the winner of the 2015 “Prix des Amis du Palais de Tokyo”. In 2016, Sara Favriau has benefited from a 600 sqm-personal exhibition at Palais de Tokyo in Paris: La redite en somme, ne s’amuse pas de sa répétition singulière. In 2017, she had a solo-show at Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire (FR), Independent Brussels and made a residency: Arts and the world of work with Ministry of Culture, in partnership with the CNEAI. In 2018, she represented France at the first Bangkok Biennale Beyond Bliss as a guest of honor. In 2019, she conducted the French Los Angeles Exchange (FLAX) residency and participated to the first Rabat Biennale. In 2020, she started a long term collaboration with INRAe and the biologists of UFM (Unité des Forêts Méditerranéenne). She was invited by Villa Noailles.