Cécile B. Evans, Miu Miu, Memory, and Language: Weaving Narratives in the Fabric of Art

We have long recognized and admired their exceptional ability to capture the most subtle human emotions in conceivable silicone scenarios. Thus, upon discovering that they would create a piece for the Miu Miu Fall Winter 2024 show in Paris, we were eager to interview Cécile B. Evans, the pioneering artist who inspires us and provokes unanswered thus necessary questions through their work in video, sculpture, performance, and installation.

At the show, the Palais d’Iéna was transformed through Evans's video installations for "RECEPTION!"—a work that stars the acclaimed actress Guslagie Malanda as Reception, one of the last human translators on Earth. Amid a storage crisis erasing digital memories, Reception interprets an intimate memory from Irish Gaelic to French, dictating to a machine that records it in English. This process triggers her own memory to escape, weaving through the show space in a mesmerizing screen ballet that explores the intersection of bodily and digital memory storage.

Evans's innovative practice probes the intricate relationship between artificial technology and human emotion, positioning them as a pivotal voice in the Post-Internet art movement. In this interview, full of critical insights and reflections, Evans explores the meaning of their latest work presented at the show, illuminating the interconnected themes of memory, language and the materiality of digital technologies. They highlight the critical role of collaboration, as experienced in their recent project with the Miu Miu team and OMA, underscoring the value of artistic freedom and the depth of personal histories encapsulated in clothing and memory-holding objects. Moreover Evans's reflections on the choice of the former European Parliament as a filming location opens a dialogue on power dynamics and the contributions of women in technology, emphasizing the importance of accessible art and challenging conventional spaces for art reception.

In “RECEPTION!”, you depict a future where humanity’s last surviving translator transcribes defunct languages in a flooding data center. What inspired you to explore this intersection of language extinction and environmental collapse?

I think that the intersection of language extinction and environmental collapse is exactly right. Too often we consider things like language, memory, or our feelings as something immaterial, or at least that's how it's been presented to us historically. And actually, it is incredibly material. It impacts and shapes our everyday and is intrinsically linked to something like an ecological crisis.

At the core of the project is this idea of the storage of memory. Understanding that the memories that we share and that we hold within us are also now held by our technological devices. And this idea or this phantom idea of the cloud as this ephemeral magic thing is something that most people now are able to confront as actually being entire buildings that require a lot of energy and also materials, metals, lithium, and other elements to maintain them.

So this idea of intersection, or as I would call it intersectionality, is really at the core of this project, but also most of the projects that I do. That's why they're always dense and complicated because I think it's impossible for me at least in my mind to isolate these things. They're all related and we experience that in one way or another every single day of the 21st century.

The main character in your film serves as a bridge between the past and the present by transcribing memories. How do you see the role of AI in preserving or interpreting human memories in the future?

So I think you're asking about my relationship to AI and I think in preserving or interpreting human memories in the future, I think we can even talk about that now. On the one hand, we have something as simple as our phone or our laptop as an extension of our brains and bodies. Memories are actually stored in our bodies, they don't appear in one location, they exist as a network within us. Many people have examined even that memories can be passed down generationally.

Essentially there are many ways to look at it, but technology has always been an extension of the body. We have pencils because it no longer made sense to carve on cave walls or to write with our blood. We have phones, smartphones and laptops and hard drives and cameras, which contain more memories and images of memories and sounds than our own brains could ever have the capacity for. We need them in that sense, but what isn't, and there is a great benefit in the preservation. One thing that isn't, two things that aren't really discussed are the fact that all of these containers are owned by private entities, have been formed by private entities and come with very specific formatting.

The way that our memories are preserved is very similar to how oral histories or something like a testimony in a global organization like the UN or in the court of law, the way that these things get transcribed to history, they pass through a very specific aesthetic, a very specific formatting, a very specific selection process that inevitably changes how our memories are preserved. I think it's interesting that there's not much questioning around this and on top of that, that so often we just throw away our phones or we get rid of our laptops or that we don't really manage our data in a meaningful way on the day to day. We've essentially outsourced this again to these private entities, to these companies.

I think a huge thing about talking about something like AI is not necessarily looking at it in this binary way of it's good or it's bad, but looking at it as something that is human because humans have made it with all of their intentions and limitations. And I think it's good to start to examine AI in that way is how is this performing an extension of something that I want to do and how is this doing something that I don't want it to do. I think that's important.

The collaboration with Miu Miu for the Fall/Winter 2024–25 runway show allowed you to venture into new creative territories. How did this partnership impact your artistic approach to “RECEPTION!” and its themes?

This partnership really changed my artistic approach in the sense that I didn't feel alone. I came into this with a great amount of trust and respect for Mrs. Prada, for the entire Miu Miu team, for also OMA, the architecture firm that worked on the scenography. I think I'm very used to working with large teams and collaborating in that way, but the responsibility is always mine as an author. And while the idea is still mine and I very much was given a carte blanche to work on it, I think it was nice to be able to feel trusted and respected and to draw from the immense experience that the Miu Miu team and OMA have.

Creatively this really gave me a lot of liberty and gave me a possibility to take things to a next level. It was important to understand the context that I was entering, which is a fashion show. It's not an art exhibition and really relying on the Miu Miu team to help me understand that context and what people were expecting from that, I really enjoyed because it's very important to me as an artist to always be speaking to people and with people and not just at or in an authoritative way. And it was really exciting to have to develop a new set of muscles for this very different context and attention span. I really enjoyed it.

Guslagie Malanda in "RECEPTION!" by Cécile B. Evans © Cécile B. Evans / Miu Miu

Clothes often hold personal histories and memories. In the context of your collaboration with Miu Miu, how do you perceive the role of fashion as a vessel for memory?

This is a great question and something I didn't really think about in the process, but it's very apparent since having watched the runway show, which was about this idea of transformation and memory and the passage of time. So from childhood to growing older, understanding the way that clothes are used to shape different moments in your life, and then they go on to really hold and contain those different moments. It's very similar to the devices that I chose. The USB, the hard drive, the toy animatronic hamster that I imagined was the main character's reception might have had since childhood and holding onto this, the rice cooker, which I imagined maybe at some point belonged to her parents and she's maintained it. The camera, which is obviously not a futuristic camera and that she clearly would have had to put a lot of care into maintaining that these objects are vessels for memories and clothes are very much this as well.

I think we can all look back on a particular point in time where we wore an item of clothing and remember the people that were around us, the emotions that transpired and also the possibility for those clothes to transport, not just us, but I could imagine, for example, my kid one day wearing an item of clothing and even if she doesn't necessarily have all of the sense memory that I would have with the smell and the feeling and the touch, I like to believe that somehow subliminally or even through a process of osmosis, she's transported to that time, even in whatever abstract way.

Still from "RECEPTION!" by Cécile B. Evans © Cécile B. Evans / Miu Miu

The setting of a repurposed data center for “RECEPTION!” is particularly evocative. Can you discuss the symbolism behind choosing this location and how it relates to the broader themes of your work?

The parliament hemicycle, which was the first European parliament and was used for a very short period of time, but I can imagine a lot of decisions were made there by very powerful people, specifically a lot of powerful men. And I really wanted to choose a location where this power had circulated and also really think about what it would mean to see this woman working in collaboration with machines, which is also something historically that has been erased. For example, the first something I've dealt with in previous works is that the first computer programmers were actually women and in the history books at first, they were shown in pictures with the first processors, the first computers, but described as being models who were there to display it.

So it was important for me that the viewer see or feel this woman working in this data storage center, but that also this former parliament, this hemicycle that used to be a place of a particular kind of power, she now finds herself alone and with a certain sense of agency. I'm always thinking of these global organizations and their general assembly places as sites where memories are transferred. It's where people go to testify of their lived experience and where we see that lived experience be translated, not just through different languages, but also for their transcription into history and their understanding through a very particular lens.

Your collaboration with Miuccia Prada allowed you to explore video format in a less formal setting. How do you think unconventional spaces influence the reception and interpretation of art?

I would not call a fashion show in a less formal setting at all. It's a very particular format that has very particular goals and outcomes. I would say that an exhibition format is less formal, but I would agree that it's less accessible. The fashion show also is live streamed and also then becomes accessible to a very broad audience. I think this thing of a very broad audience is really integral to how I want to move forward with my practice. I think audiences have never been smarter and more tuned in to different references and huge existential themes that concern them every single day. I mean, the world that we live in is very complicated and very difficult. I think as an artist, as a filmmaker, that becomes a direct line to talk to more people than I think I would have been able to at the beginning of my career. It's a muscle that I really want to be able to develop how to distill these really difficult and complex themes in a way that they can be not understood, but received by a large audience without alienating anyone.

The character in “Reception!” is portrayed as humanity’s last surviving translator, highlighting the fragility of language. In your view, what role does language play in shaping our memories and identities?

That's a really huge question. At the beginning of the film, you hear a woman sharing an intimate conversation in Irish Gaelic, which is a language that was almost lost due to the English colonizing Ireland and making a huge colonial effort to make people speak English. It highlights the role of language as a kind of intimacy, as a kind of agency. I think we forget that memory doesn't always need to be performative. It can be something shared by a very particular group of people who understand the value and significance of that memory. That language is a form of representation, and that representation isn't always the most powerful thing. A language carries with it a sort of personal lived experience that will never be understood by other people, and that's okay.

When we think about translation and interpretation from one language or format to another, it's worth considering what is lost in that translation, what visibility is gained, and what invisibility is lost. We don't have an answer or a value to place on it, just an interest and curiosity in examining what that point of exchange is, and what the important things to pay attention to are.

Video installation of "RECEPTION!" for Miu Miu FW24 show at Palais d'Iéna © Cécile B. Evans / Miu Miu

As someone who works at the intersection of technology, art, and memory, what potential or challenges do you see in the future of creative collaboration between artists and fashion brands?

A collaboration with a fashion brand becomes interesting for an artist. In the context of working with Miu Miu and Prada, Miuccia Prada has a long history of respecting and giving agency to artists. An artist is strongest when they're not being asked to do anything other than what they normally do. I was never asked to make a commercial, I was asked to investigate a specific theme that I wanted to explore in this particular context.

What's nice about support from or collaboration and exchanges with fashion brands and artists is that we know where that money is coming from. Miu Miu and Prada as a brand and how it functions in the world is known. Unfortunately, public museums are increasingly relying on private funding that is not always very transparent. As an artist, it becomes difficult to understand exactly where that money is coming from and how that becomes a context for how your work is being viewed. Whereas with something like this, from the beginning, what I really appreciated was the transparency of everyone's role.

Even though we're still very much working in a capitalist context, which is not my favorite context to work in, I think this experience was very unique. It's really nice when the brand is confident enough to listen to us because our link to the audience and ultimately their clients is very precious to us. That's a skill set that we've developed for a really long time and something enormous that we can bring. I don't think it's always the case that a brand is able to be in that position. But I think they have a lot to gain from the radicality and the experimentation that we bring to a context that is incredibly established.

Interview by Gloria Maria Cappelletti

Cécile B. Evans's Portrait by Inès Manai

RED•EYE WORLD