Cindy Coutant is a visual artist and researcher based in Geneva. Her films, installations and augmented readings focus on the slimy entanglements of life and technology, the triumph of slobber over language, and the dumb whims of the Western world to master an elusive nature.

Her practice-led research, developed in her thesis entitled Disarming the grand narrative of technology: high-tech sexo-semiotics and grammar of the future, sets up a genealogy of the minor critique of technology to actualize our relationship to future. It addresses the anxiety of bodies and the indeterminacy of affects as crucial issues for capitalist industry, but also as the foundation of another technological narrative.

Co-founder of l4bouche
︎ Email

Caretaker of Bachelor [inter]action @HEAD - Genève

NOW
︎︎︎︎︎︎
· 01.02 – 12.04.25 Elle empêche les choses de dormir @40mcube, Rennes (FR) 
· 13.02 – 10.05.25 @Mécènes du sud, Montpellier (FR) 
· 14.02 — 24.08.25 Mezzanine Sud - Prix des Amis des Abattoirs @Les Abattoirs, Musée - Frac Occitanie Toulouse (FR)


RECENT PAST
︎︎︎︎︎︎
· AIAIA Sweatshop, @Duplex, Genève (CH)
. Entretien sur l’art @Fondation Pernod Ricard
. The future is unmanned @Liveinyourhead - Genève (CH)
. Temps de Mars, Musée des beaux-arts, La Chaux-de-Fonds (CH)
. Sounds of Earth Part. 2: Afterlife, mixtape w/ Théo Pozoga (commissioned by FRAC Corsica)
. Entretien (fr) @Trou Noir
· 1984-2024 : Désarmer le grand récit de la technologie. Sexo-sémiotique high tech et grammaire du futur, soutenance de thèse, 08.02.24 @Fresnoy
. Les heures sauvages + Anarkhè-exposition @CWB Paris (FR)
. TechXploitation @Amicale du futur, Lyon (FR)

︎ l4bouche




Arcana Mundi — Economy and Eccentricity



“Profuse strains of unpremeditated art.”
(Shelley)
                 A rock is a perfect metaphor, an allegory in volume. When placed it’s sculptural limits beget a kind of artistic proposition — and when considered with reduced anthropomorphism and ungeologically — produce a ready-made analog to the causation and bounds of our attempts at the understanding of all things.

Here the sculptor has made no concessions; no attempts to curry favor with curators or collectors — pieces wholly outside discourse. And if pressed for an affiliate movement for these “sculptures” (i.e. Cubism, Mannerism, etc.)… perhaps Monism or Cosmogonism? Definitely not Conceptualism or Pataphysics — Actualism?

The analog? Well for sure it is 1:1. Weird; yes — a knot to be admired for it’s curves — not for untying. An emergent surface as thick as it’s mass. 
 
Were it possible for the instances of our minds or world events to be mapped and dimensionally materialized, something similar to a rock would appear — areas of smoothness yielding to pockmarked particularities, density shifts and feathered explosions. What really is the shape of a boom town? A pilgrim’s journey? A section of jungle mayhem? A boring era? The silhouette of a father’s cold slap? The contours of a brief, intense friendship? Comfortably we perceive all of these things as ready to be integrated into ledgers or novels or timelines; but really they are queer crags and striations of unimaginable idiosyncrasy.

So yes, the reflective, reasonable yield of our mind has much symmetry (computation, cataloguing, narrativizing, etc.) but it’s actual shape is no shape, but unfolding chaos and singularity visible only to our particular time-scale. Our species-wide symmetries and quantizations are basically improvisations white-labeled onto directionless infinitude attempting the constant creation of navigable Dimension.

So, look intimately at a rock, walk around it, get up close to it, savor it’s complexion and composition as you would any painting or temple and see it as the faultless mirror that it is — a truly perfect sculpture.


ABSTRACTION AND EMPIRICAL ILLUSTRATION
We live our lives made up of a great quantity of isolated instants. So as to be lost at the heart of a multitude of things. (From the Double Dream of Spring, 1970.)




  1. Gavrilo Princip’s last grocery list written
  2. The time that alligator ate that fish
  3. When the Yongzheng Emperor found that weird dust bunny under his throne
  4. The great earthquake of Alexandria
  1. The invention of expectation in literature
  2. When the heaviest cacao fruit fell in Takalik Abaj
  3. Animesh eats his first Fly Agaric mushroom