LUCYS

Lucys is conceived as an expanded field of three hundred upside-down crystal glasses, each containing a cockroach.

The work begins with a familiar gesture: covering an insect we find disgusting with a glass, intending to slide a sheet of paper underneath and carry it outside rather than kill it. A cockroach that could survive a nuclear catastrophe can nevertheless die beneath a glass through human forgetfulness. Repeated three hundred times, this simple, lazy gesture takes on an elegant form while depriving the insects of their greatest strength: reproduction.

The title refers to Lucy (AL 288-1), the Australopithecus afarensis discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. Here, Lucy is multiplied into hundreds of possible beginnings: new Lucys from which a new human species might emerge. A glass is enough to interrupt a possible future.

The glasses evoke Leibniz’s monads: closed, self-contained worlds, each holding an isolated center of life. Each insect remains visible, but cannot reach the others. A gesture intended to avoid killing becomes a lasting separation, preventing contact. Three hundred lives can continue individually, while the continuity of the species is suspended. Loneliness coincides with this contradiction: remaining alive, yet deprived of the relationship through which life can continue.

Approximately two hundred and eighty cockroaches survived the exhibition.