Mimosa Echard's 'Sporal' Unites Science, Art, and Video Games
Mimosa Echard’s Sporal exhibits a dreamy multiverse, combining science and technology. Her work imagines a simple organism’s transformative journey through a psychedelic, fluid universe.
The artist Mimosa Echard’s work is anchored in the organic, living world. She brings into play—literally—through her own mischievous vision, the issues linked to the mysteries of memory and our own interactions with our environment.
Echard is also the winner of this year’s Prix Marcel Duchamp, and her exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, Sporal, made a lasting impression. At the heart of the exhibition was a role-playing video game, created in collaboration with developer Andréa Sardin and the Australian artist Aodhan Madden, and inspired as much by comic books as by biology. In the game, a single-celled protagonist makes their way through a dreamlike patchwork of worlds, mutating into different life forms through an exchange of fluids with other species. The viewer is enveloped in Echard’s psychedelic universe, where gender and sexuality exist in new, perpetually evolving forms.
"The video game [is] much more than an exercise in playful style; it challenges the audience to consider their relationship to the natural world."
The game is based on Echard’s research on myxomycetes, which she began in 2019 while a resident at the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto. The unicellular organisms, colloquially known as slime molds, are neither plant nor animal. Nor are they a fungus, although they sometimes resemble them. “Myxomycetes appear to me as robust, mysterious, and indifferent lifeforms, whose familiarity with both the past and the future allows them to reflect the decomposition of our social structures as well as the degradation of the environment,” says Echard. “They also allow us to dream about, in a confused and slimy form, the forms taken on by technology.”
The French chemist Antoine Lavoisier said, “Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed.” Sporal’s lush, sensual dimension establishes a dialogue between human and non-human life—the video game carries within it much more than an exercise in playful style; it challenges the audience to consider their relationship to the natural world, to not to take our environment for an immutable asset. More than ever, it is clear that our actions have meaning. And a true sense of purpose should show us a way out.
