Art Showroom: Rémi Lécussan
Rémi Lécussan
“Ah, if only we all had the extraordinary luck of relying on a clever artist to design our dovecotes, our homes, or the devices through which we send our messages!”
– Donna J. Haraway
“Beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella. ”
– Lautréamont
Mimicry V, 2023 vs. Eye Wash Station, 2025
While flipping through Rémi Lecussan’s portfolio, my gaze pauses on a photo of a tall black structure rising in what appears to be a gallery exhibition space; in the background, a street is faintly visible. The caption beneath the title Mimicry V – 2023 reads: “Data-center patch panels, cuttlebone, millet.” Indeed, the oblong shapes of cuttlebones are clearly visible, their chalky white piercing the black wire mesh of the data-center racks like mineral ghosts. In one corner of the page, a close-up photo reveals a millet head, its warm hue glowing through the dark grid. As the work’s technical specs suggested, these racks have in fact been transformed into aviaries. All they’re missing are a few feathered tenants to liven up Art-o-rama’s hushed aisles with their song.
“Mimicry V”? But what exactly is this strange piece mimicking? What is it pretending to be? Does it speak of the end of a world? A kind of post-apocalyptic reallocation, perhaps? The anticipation of a degrowth era in which, cut off from electricity and networks, we revert to the good old days of carrier pigeons—whose legendary reliability, despite their somewhat sluggish pace, still rivals today’s fiber optics. The server racks, then, would have simply slid from one function to another in a logic of reuse.
A satisfying hypothesis—until it’s immediately challenged by a footnote from the artist:
“Server racks from a data center, where our data is stored, transformed into aviaries with millet and cuttlebone. Research aimed at expanding data storage capacity is now beginning to use DNA as a writing system.”
So, we are perhaps looking at a prefiguration of a symbiotic future between the biological and the technological. Knowing that five grams of DNA can theoretically store as much data as an entire data center, one struggles to imagine the massive volume of information that could be contained in a well-fed dozen of parakeets. The only thing left is to imagine the interface that would make this flow of information possible. Maybe a few droppings…?
There’s something in today’s technological promises—decidedly more science than fiction—that permanently channels surrealist imagination. As we might paraphrase Lautréamont: “Beautiful as the chance encounter, inside a data center rack, of pigeon DNA and information.”
And for anyone who still doubts what they’re seeing, the artist has placed, directly opposite his aviaries, the work Eye Wash Station—a “ready-made aidé” dedicated to the regardeurs (viewers) itself, that crucial interface through which we “make paintings.”
Yasmine d’O. Berlin, August 2025
