Survival Training Station II, 2023

“Faced with the anxiety related to the rising sea levels and melting glaciers, (…) individuals channel their energies into various avenues: some optimize their physical fitness, others seek refuge in their domestic cocoon to escape the world’s problems. More radically, survivalists believe they can avoid the impending catastrophe and equip themselves accordingly. In his exhibition, Manuel Poitras recovers various objects bearing these mild to severe symptoms of neoliberal individualism from websites of the second hand economy and reconfigures them into different fountain-assemblages… Water travels from one object to the next in nearly closed circuits, perpetually flooding the objects. Perhaps this omnipresence of water is the climate anxiety so widespread today.” (from Loïc Chauvin’s text)

Materials: bicycle wheels, sports shoes, wood structures, rope, reusable tie wraps, plastic storage container, ball, vinyl tubing, electric pump, water.

Installation views at the exhibition DIY Flood, CIRCA Art actuel, May 6 - June 17 2023.