Opening reception: 5th of June, 2025, 6:30-9:00pm (Get your free tickets on Eventbrite)
Hours: (the whole month of June)
Tuesday to Friday: 11AM-6PM
Saturday: 11AM-4PM
S4M4R3S is a kinetic and performative installation by the duo aenl that explores the intersections between nature, technology, and spirituality. Suspended from the ceiling, a thermal printer activates once a day, at a random time, to drop a print: a BMP-stylized « helicopter » maple seed. This samara, printed on paper, spirals towards the ground. As the days go by, these prints accumulate into an increasingly dense column of paper, at once a waterfall, a stalactite, a trace of time.
The device creates a suspension of waiting: we cannot choose the moment of printing, we only witness the consequences of the automated act. The work escapes the spectacular to better reveal the poetry of passing time. Slow, cyclical, patient, the installation develops outside the usual framework.
Through S4M4R3S, a reflection is offered on our relationship with time, the imperceptible, and technological promise. The work engages in a dialogue between future and present, between the potential of a repeated gesture and its deferred material manifestation. The installation places the public face to face with our desire for interactivity, our thirst for immediacy, while evoking an ecology of the gaze and of time.
The aenl duo here joins the questions posed by the common thread of our triennial theme La Jachère, namely slowing down, creating silence, cultivating emptiness as a source of creation. By proposing a work where the gesture is repeated without spectacle, where the fruit of the action is dissociated from its cause, they reaffirm the need to think of time no longer as a production line, but as a material to be experienced. This installation offers a hanging space, where the work is not immediately presented, and where contemplation takes precedence over consumption.
About the artists
aenl, the montreal-based artistic duo composed of Anna Eyler et Nicolas Lapointe, has been exploring the intersection between digital technology and mysticism since 2014. Their practice questions the influence of online environments and virtual worlds in our daily life. Mixing video game aesthetics, science-fiction, and data centres, they create works that blur the lines between the real and the virtual, questioning the links to the digital world. The duo has participated in residencies with Espace Projet (Montréal, 2015), Verticale (Laval, 2018) et Bòlit : Centre d’Art Contemporani (Catalogne, 2019). Their recent collective exhibitions include Object Gardens at PAVED Arts (Saskatoon, 2023) ; MUTEK (Montréal, 2024) ; and Vector Festival (Toronto, 2025). Their work was recently exhibited as part of the joint exhibition t.ether, at the DRAC : Art Actuel (2024).
S4M4R3S will be exhibited at Le Labo until Saturday, June 28, 2025.
