The Society of Secret Images is a social fiction made by the collaboration between artists, scientists and the inhabitants of Gerland. The Society is creating an active collection of images that will belong to the community. The members will be able to activate and modify the collection by empirical exercises.

Through a game of visibilities and invisibilities, inclusion and exclusion, the project brings to the surface relations between people, territory and knowledge around issues such as soil, water and skies uses.

By exploring ways of agitating the ecology of the image in the area (where is it born, how it grows and changes, when it appears and disappears, and whom is affecting), the Society experiments on a possible way to redistribute the tools with which Culture and Science administrate the power over the sensible.

 To manage the sensible is, at last, to control what we see and discuss in a certain era and context. If the community manages the administration of the sensible in their own territory, they could be able to re-articulate the ways of looking and doing, and create a constant shift and redefinition of each actor’s expertise.

 

 

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The Society of Secret Images is a social apparatus whose mission is to collect, protect, discuss, and materialize images of the non-visible for the eye. These images are beyond the borders of our surface (e.g. the underground, the outer-space, the inner body), they escape from human scale (when it is necessary to use technology such as the microscope, the telescope or artistic representation) and travel from the past or the future (they don’t have a starting point in the present, although they manifest through the present-tense of artistic interpretation). Through the knowledge of the non-visible, The Society seeks to gather and garden a different knowledge about humans in a specific given place in time: Gerland´s social present.

 

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Surfing the surface while facing Sur.

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The need of shielding a collection is replaced by the need of experiencing a collection.

The idea of immutable preservation that chase a collection is replaced by the idea of an active transmutable collection.

The action of watching an image is replaced by the action of extracting the potentiality of the image.

The search on a past reference of an image is replaced by the search on a new genealogy derived from an image.

The use of a retinal perception is replaced by the use of a perception built by the entire body.