This is an announcement for the opening of Yves Mettler’s installation Drilling Rig from Arnex, 1929 originally made for the festival Les Urbaines and now moved to the Mus?�e Cantonal des Beaux-Arts where it has been meticulously deconstructed by the artist. Mettler’s installation dramatizes and magnifies subtle relations between cosmology, geological time and mobilization of capital on the planet. The installation will also be accompanied by a collaboration between Mettler and I that will gradually develop throughout the course of the exhibition:

On April 26th, a performance / lecture will be held by Yves Mettler and Reza Negarestani (via video-conference) as the closing event for their writing collaboration. Written as a serial publication since the beginning of Mettler’s installation, the text ‘Arnex-1: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Asphalt‘ unfolds a psychoanalytical dialogue between the analyst Rig and the mysterious Patient O. Over seven psychoanalytical sessions schematizing the seven circles of hell, the dialogue unravels an aetiological examination of the memory of geological time as the twisted sum of traumatic scars left by the cosmological shock and contingent mobilization of capital. Art’s meticulous attention to the surface (landscape) parallels psychoanalysis’ dedicated focus on superficial phenomena as a means of dramatically bringing into focus transversal dynamics of depths otherwise invisible to the keenest of eyes.

Opening date: Thursday, February 9, 2012, 6:30pm.
Address: Mus?�e cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Palais de Rumine, place de la Riponne 6