Carnages (1999)

“Carnage, the work conceived by Mitsiko Miller and Eva Quintas, has several levels of texts, including Alice, the one that could be linked more directly to the photo-novel. Straight out of pantomime, Alice and her acolytes take part in a narrative strongly inspired by children’s stories, to which reference is made explicitly, already in the title. This story takes a parodic path in order to draw us unequivocally into the world of the symbolic. The adoption of such an invoice could surprise a priori, but it testifies to a certain humor, which will appear always more dark and complex. Indeed, this story, altogether linear in its structure, is superimposed on an underground space in which the visitor engages when he borrows the corridors opened in the story. The series of stories, in reality pierced on all sides thanks to the hyperlinks, leads to a bottomless pit, a journey into the dark universe of cannibalism establishing a fascinating bridge between the stories of early childhood and the History of humanity. The interest of the two artists for cultural diversity is manifested here by this incursion on the side of cannibalism which leads them to push their investigation ever further, as the Web allows, from one universe to another and from one register to another. the other without any distinction. From fiction, the visitor suddenly moves on to the documentary aspect, which will turn out to be an abyss where the desire of the other becomes consumption, ingestion, digestion and annihilation, whether in the field of eroticism or that of cultural or territorial appropriation. Moreover, Carnage is not without alluding, by extension, to the voracious and sometimes malicious nature of the Web as well as to the immense potential for appropriation that digital technology signifies.”

Sylvie Parent
FiXions, cinq photoromans sur le web
Electronic magazine, International Center for Contemporary Art, no. 09, December 1999