Stefan Eichhorn

Stefan Eichhorn lives and works in Marseille, where he set up home after a residency in the city’s northern suburbs, in 2014. The artist is especially fond of imagery to do with anticipation theories, among which we may come across new worlds resulting, according to Philip K. Dick, from “conceptual dislocation”.¹ To do this, you have to proceed by way of the experience of the science-fiction hypothesis, and accept a cognitive distancing with regard to narrative and the certain confusion caused by a similarity with reality.

During a residency at the Observatory of the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), the artist produced the series Salvage 1 (2018), presenting a set of reconstructed satellites in the form of maquettes, then photographed like a complete pastiche of an orbital track against a black ground—thus bringing the illusion full circle. Only the descriptive literature about this will put you on the right track. A quick visit to the Internet site stuffin.space, mapping in real time the future satellite ghosts and other protagonists involved in a conquest of space will assume the task of persuading you.² Stefan Eichhorn pays special attention to the detail of scientific language, from its populariziation to its most rational state, and his titles already tell us a lot about the author’s gentle irony: Ils nous ont promis des voitures volantes, mais nous n’avons que des parcmètres fonctionnant à l’énergie solaire (2019) [They promised us flying cars, but all we have is solar-powered parking-meters].

Among the many fictions applying the above-mentioned American author’s famous “conceptual dislocation”, a short story by Edward Morgan Forster, recently discovered thanks to a tip from the artist, also stands out. As a social and environmental dystopia dating from the early 20th century, La Machine s’arrête/The Machine Stops echoes strangely in the epidemiological crisis of the current health and economic crisis.³ Let us admit that the great bulk of humankind lives underground in individual cells, that all vital requirements are met by a machine, that communications only exist through a video-conference system permanently available, and delivering unlimited information about everything the human being wants to know: a lecture on the Mediterranean Sea, the history of acousmatic music, the practice of tantric yoga… Or to put in another way, let us suppose that elsewhere no longer exists, that tomorrow looks like today, and that science is capable of prolonging day and night by following the rhythm of the sun, and even surpassing it.

Over and above an anxiety-inducing similarity with reality, this short story introduces, above all, the themes of another form of science-fiction more broadly developed from the 1960s on. Less narrative and more political, this new science-fiction influenced by the American counter-culture prolongs its critical viewpoint in the face of society by proposing a line of thinking about ecology, sexuality, feminism, the role of the media, and the new technologies. In this respect, it marks Stefan Eichhorn’s interest during a residency in the United States. He focused, at that time, on Drop City—the first hippie community set up in a rural environment, in opposition to the US army’s engagement in the Vietnam war, and to multi-consumerist capitalist society. In 1965, that mixed bunch of people would borrow the model of the geodesic dome invented by Richard Buckminster Fuller,⁴ author of the famous Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, pinpointing the planet’s limited resources and the notion of ephemeralization defined as the “making more with less” tendency of technological progress. He was one of the first people to disseminate a systemic vision of our environment, but he is nevertheless better known as the inventor of the geodesic dome—a model bequeathed by Walther Bauersfeld⁵, of which he produced a more sophisticated and lasting model, with a dozen students at Black Mountain College during the summer of 1948. The American would subsequently sell that patent to the army and give lectures on that same subject until the end of his life. It was not until the early 1970s that media coverage of him would be carried on through a new environmental activism.

Stefan Eichhorn’s project, embarked upon when he returned to the United States, and titled Tents (2010-2019), thus proposed shifting the markers of the American counter-culture into the art arena. His fascination with that structure extended through several series of works, in particular Paper Models (2019), an exercise involving the reproduction on paper of the precepts of the geodesic dome popularized by Lloyd Kahn’s Domebook, Kahn being a pioneer of the movements for alternative architecture, and also the publisher of the famous Whole Earth Catalog.

For the past ten years or so, Stefan Eichhorn has also been collecting representations of the geodesic dome, playing host to the most confined environments, from the most futurological to the least scientific. In the end of the day, the dome would thus be the image of a plural future—that of Bauersfeld’s planetarium, of Buckminster Fuller and of hippie communities reawakening our ecological consciousness, but also of private utopia. By the same token, the series Greetings from the Future (2013) sarcastically showed biospheres confined beneath greenhouses that were vestiges of the European industrial revolution, and flirted with survivalism.⁶ From all this resulted a broad panorama ranging from the Victorian age to the 1990s, the climax of which is probably still Biosphere II, an experimental site based in Arizona bringing several ecosystems together: a tropical forest, a desert, savannah, a marsh, an ocean and its coral reef, where occurred: “The most exciting project since the launch by John. F. Kennedy of the new space frontier”.⁷ The undertaking, which is still controversial in terms of its scientific viability, today features among the most visited sites in Arizona—just behind the Grand Canyon National Park.

Arlène Berceliot Courtin, May 2020.

Translated by Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods