L’Absurdistan

Built in the late 15th century, Hôtel de Châteaubriant remains one of largest private, aristocratic mansions in Nantes. Over the years, it has come to be known as Hôtel de la Papotière, Hôtel Becdelièvre, and finally Hôtel de Briord. Rebuilt in the 17th century and significantly remodeled throughout the 20th, the building was ultimately acquired by the City of Nantes in the late 19th century and housed the École des Beaux-Arts from 1904 to 2017. Since 2020, it has been the HQ of Nantes’ Department of Heritage and Archaeology.

Invited by LVAN to create an installation alongside her exhibition at the HAB Galerie, Gloria Friedmann presents a piece featuring a set of ten characters.

These human-sized figures are frozen mid-movement, as if “paused”. They are connected to an oversized figure at their center, entirely made of cables and computer debris. Here, Friedmann expresses her concern for humanity’s future in a world that she describes as an “Absurdistan”. The artist wishes to remind us that the human species is simply an intermediate creature in Earth’s life cycle, and that it is in itself also “nature”, since it originates from the Earth’s natural processes, and is an integral part of its functioning.

This is how she uses the term “biped” to describe humans, referring to their earthly means of locomotion and capacity to move on two hind limbs – capacities that, in the collective imagination, set them apart from primates and allowed them to become human.

With Absurdistan, Friedmann denounces the invasiveness of technology, the ideology of the “enhanced” human, and the rapid influence of AI in every aspect of our lives:
“We, humans of the 25th hour, are constantly being reanimated by a neverending stream of information, images, selfies… We have become wired captives, subject to a politburo that ignores our human element.”