Deborah Schamoni

The jungle is a territory of fantasies and delusions. A no-go zone where its absolutely non- virtual reality would be haunted by chimeric creatures, sorcerers, rituals, trance states, snake souls, disguised mysteries, trafficking, threats and remedies, legends and frightening beauty.

The law of the jungle is that of the survival of the strongest, of the fittest and smartest. Man vs. the Wild: contrary to the sailors who use the stars to guide them, in the jungle survival is a step-by-step play, based on the slow and painstaking observation of the elements that inhabit the ground. In litterature, the jungle is often a nocturnal whispering, frozen or stifling hot, romantic and hostile. It represents a mental and physical quest, made of wonderment and wounds. The jungle inflicts blows and scratches. Its exoticism is surrealist Douanier Rousseau’s paintings both mesmerising and sensual. In the works of the Latin- American painter Wifredo Lam, the jungle is revolutionary. It burns with napalm bombs in the opening sequence of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, a movie that in 1979 brings to the big screen a reminder that the jungle is also a violent territory of conflicts and traps, a place of conquest and resistance. The jungle is a book, a collection of Rudyard Kipling’s novellas; its Indian imaginary was adapted later on for the silver screen by Walt Disney. Mowgli, the child that was raised by wolves, gives then his name to the ape starring in the video clips and the lyrics of the French rap band PNL; their mind-blowing music as ambiance sounds tell, in a raw and melancholy way, the tale of everyday life in the inner cities and the ghettos, these concrete urban jungles.

Jungle is a kind of music. Its electronic “jolts” appeared in working-class England in the 1990’s, accelerating the rhythms of reggae and of the hip hop; later on, it gave birth to the drum and bass. The jungle is present also as emojis in the keyboards of smartphones among insects, animals and stylised vegetation in Photoshop-ed shades and layers. In the work of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the jungle is a crepuscular, twilight zone. It “stars” in his theatre play “Fever Room”, a work that immerses the spectators in a universe of movie screens and light tunnels filled with hypnotising smoke. A play that displays the “portrait” of his country in collapse and questioning its future: the jungle is, according to his words, a place where “the seeds of happiness and oppression were sown”. The jungle is a pure and absolute object, it vibrates, it sweats. In 1939, Aimé Césaire wrote is his Notebook of the Return to the Native Land (Cahier d’un retour au pays natal): “from looking at trees, I have become a tree and my long legs have dug in the ground large venom sacs, high cities of bones”; the jungle is political.

The jungle makes the front page of the press that never ceases to report on the hum suffering that takes refuge in Calais. The jungle exists in advertising. The jungle is digital, this 2.0 territory living to the rhythm of the 4G; it makes overlapping creepers, of codes, of pixels, of .gif and of .zip - this never-ending back and forth between the ultra HD and the compressed - and it evolves to the rhythm of unknown algorithms.A world where all things virtual are quite real, becoming anonymous and, sometimes, outlawed when they take shelter in the Dark Net, this domain of fight and criminality. The jungle is inhabited by numbers & quantities quoted in the stock exchange and by the wolves of Wall Street.

The jungle is this oasis where good borders on evil, where a wound is close to its antidote, in an impenetrable, opaque light. “We clamour for the right to opacity for everyone”, wrote the philosopher and poet Edouard Glissant in his reflection on the ideal of transparency lauded by occidental societies (in order to better understand) as opposed to the obscure (that is to be excluded). “Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand this truly, one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components (...). The opaque is not the obscure, though it is possible for it to be so and be accepted as such. It is that which cannot be reduced”.

It is this incompressible obscurity that lights up the history of art since its emergence in the caves and then on down to the tunnels of the underground, from the airbrush to the spray paint; from the fear of bears to that of dog handlers: art is venom.

Curated by Hugo Vitrani
Text: Hugo Vitrani
Photos: Fred Laures, Paul Nicouét