France Fiction is made up of Stéphane Argillet, Marie Bonnet, Eric Camus, Lorenzo Cirrincione and

Nicolas Nakamoto. Founded in 2004 France Fiction is a collective that sees itself as one synthetic

person, inventing collective event horizons. This synthetic person is highly adaptable. You might

describe it, for want of a better term, as plastic. The concept of open-endedness should be employed

here. It is completed, and yet, in a sense, essentially incomplete. The mentality, memory, and identity

of each of its member is still there, although deeply sublimated. It exists as a subconscious that could

be triggered to the surface. Its electro-encephalogram shows up as a strange pattern.

The main brain pattern is there and recognizable. But there is something else as well. Almost as if

another, or other brain patterns, were transposed on its own. Rather feeble brain patterns, subsidiary

patterns probably would be the way to say it, showing up, but not too strongly. “Clasped hands and

brotherhood. Sharp, cold stars above a desert of stone. The reaching out and snaring of the data from

the stars. The long weighing of the data inside a biological computer. The swift, mutual pooling of five

separate pools of thought.”

On both floors of the gallery space two identical marble plates are displayed. The first, encrypted and

collectively engraved, details the writing process as a shared history – it gathers each of France Fiction’s

collaborative titles to date as a corpse. The plate’s broken shape resembles classical Greek symbolons

that are taken, in order to be later reunited and sealed in alliance. On the lower level of the gallery,

another plate refers to the “Chiffre de Quatre”, an alchemical monogram used by early modern bookmakers.

These two plates communicate via a marble urn filled with ink fabricated by each member of France Fiction,

all combined into one vessel. During the course of the exhibition, the vessel releases ink, that in turn,

slowly drips and seeps through the floor onto the second stone below, like a blank page filled with new

significance.

For France Fiction, ink is a substance that symbolically embodies the entirety of knowledge produced

through scripture. And in this case, engraved text refers to epigraphs, which are other non-putrescible

ways of perpetuating the memory of human achievement. Considering that ink works as a medium for

the transmission and circulation of ideas, the broken engraved inscription is a promise of a future

reconstruction of fractured memory.