On Tuesday, during Paris Fashion Week, artist Cécile B. Evans unveiled her latest project, a short film titled Reception!, which served as the backdrop for Miu Miu fall/winter 2024 runway show.
Evans has long explored the structures that lie beneath digital technologies. In 2016, at the Berlin Biennale, Cécile B. Evans showed What the Heart Wants, a piece that has since been acclaimed for exploring the relation between race and technology. Critic Hannah Black praised the work in Artforum, describing how it showed the artist’s “interest in the technologization of the social.”
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Reception! was in some ways a continuation of that. In the multi-part video installation, French actress Guslagie Malanda plays humanity’s last surviving translator. A specialist in defunct languages, she works inside of a repurposed data center that once served as a government building, transcribing other people’s memories into English as the center succumbs to flooding.
Displayed on screens suspended above the Miu Miu venue space inside the Palais d’Iéna, the AI-generated video was commissioned by Miuccia Prada, the head of the family’s eponymous label.
In an interview with WWD, Prada said that she’d gotten to know Evans work more in-depth when the artist proposed a collaboration related to Jean-Luc Godard’s Studio d’Orphée, which is located at the Fondazione Prada in Milan.
Prada is well known for incorporating artists into her brands’ projects, and according to Evans, collaborating on the Prada show allowed her to further explore the video format in a less formal setting and to delve into the theme of memory that has recently been one of her interests. She said it also let her create something new outside the confines of museum and gallery spaces, referring to the collaboration as “a place to experiment.”
