Hoël Duret

Hoël Duret writes picaresque tales of our waning decade, that of a slow and confused exit from the Anthropocene. Here, the magnificent loosers are no longer simply outsiders who have decided through their rejection of established systems to remove themselves from the game. They foreshadow the fate that awaits us all, diminished and bewildered humans, numbed by the age old habit of conquering and enslaving, and now propelled into a world newly wild. Now, the alternative is the following: ally ourselves with the rest of the living world or slowly peter out before disappearing completely. In a world rendered totally disorganized, this “chaotic rhythm or chaosmos” evoked by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (Mille Plateaux, 1980), the artist’s narrators are in turn designer (La Vie Héroïque de B.S., 2013-2015), fiber-optic cable with the gift of self awareness (UC-98, 2016–2018), journalist reporter (Too Dumb to Fail, 2018), skittish adventurer (Life is old there, 2019) or quite simply, like in the most recent project, artist (low, ongoing). Around the structure of a tale told over a number of chapters, Hoël Duret uses small strokes to paint an ecosystem made up of multiple characters and their choral points of view. The endeavor is total, almost Wagnerian. We follow in the footsteps of these narrators. We allow ourselves to be carried under the sea to be surrounded by plastic jellyfish and retired mermaids (UC-98), aboard a hellish cruise ship (Too Dumb to Fail) or to flaccidly wash up onto a beach (Life is old there). We even find ourselves propelled into a speculative future just as a major ecological crisis has taken place, staining the daytime yellow and provoking a massive flow of rich climate refugees from Silicon Valley to New Zealand (Drop out).
Ingrid Luquet-Gad