The Museum as a Place for Thought: Les Immatériaux and the Unrepresentability of Nature

Abstract

1985 saw the birth of Les Immatériaux, an exhibition curated by philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and new media theorist Thierry Chaput. Although considered a failure at the time, the project has gained cult status over the years, being recognised for its ability to prefigure many of the challenges of the twenty-first century. The hypothesis of this paper is that this predictive capacity was not exclusively due to the ideas and concepts provided by Lyotard, but to the autonomous capacity that the exhibition had to produce thought from the interactions that took place in it. To exemplify this perspective, we will take as an example a section of the exhibition called "Irreprésentable", in which the installation of a small forest of twenty metres allows us to rethink some of the key debates in contemporary art theory and philosophy, such as the question of the representable and the unrepresentable or the nature-culture binarism.