In a disused ethnographic museum located in a former human and animal zoo, an experiment unfolds over the course of one year. Navigating through history within the museum, a group of people is exposed to influence, live situations that appear accidentally, simultaneously, or without any sense of order in the building. Nothing that takes place is staged. People can imitate, repeat or transform these situations endlessly to variable intensity.

In a disused ethnographic museum located in a former human and animal zoo, an experiment unfolds over the course of one year.

Navigating through history within the museum, a group of people is exposed to influence, live situations that appear accidentally, simultaneously, or without any sense of order in the building. Nothing that takes place is staged.

People can imitate, repeat or transform these situations endlessly to variable intensity.

From a legal trial to a dance, from a hypnosis session to a sexual act, from an archive to a coronation, all these figures are presented or re-interpreted by masked holders.

A set of operations unfolds, an auto-generating process whose causes and effects remain undetermined and where everything that was written leak into the contingent in a continuous way.

The Host and the Cloud is a ritual of separation. The relations and hierarchy structuring a subject to its milieu are cut. The cultural material is recreated, its influences, the mode of exhibition exorcized.

Some witnesses were chosen to penetrate the building during the Day of the Dead, on Saint Valentine and during May Day. The experiment is indifferent to their presence.

The film shows the inability to truly grasp all rituals, unable to represent the absent subject.

Credits

Pierre Huyghe
The Host and the Cloud (film), 2009-2010
HD video, color, surround sound
Duration 2:01:30 h
Exhibition copy
(PH 052)

Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, and Esther Schipper, Berlin.