Forced to carry out the art practice workshops remotely this year, the Crédac’s Bureau des publics team Crédac uses the architectural assets of the American building of the Manufacture des Œillets: its large bay windows. From the outside, visitors and students discover on the top floor a jungle that has “grown” along the windows. This luxuriant and varied flora seems to shelter endangered living species that could easily hide there.

In the second room of the Cima Cima exhibition, Kapwani Kiwanga shows through several works how in the course of history dominated beings - human or animal - set up survival strategies through discreet movements and concealment. This is the case with the Lazarus series, which consists of four white silkscreens based on illustrations from the 19th and 20th centuries, showing “Lazarus taxa” - Potorous Gilbertii (an Australian marsupial), Heosemys depressa (a freshwater turtle), Eupetaurus cinereus (a flying squirrel), Dryococelus australis (a giant stick insect) - animal species declared extinct that are reappearing in the wild after many decades.

Glued to the windows in front of this dense, green setting, these silhouettes of living creatures made at school by children would have disappeared from the face of the Earth. But are these specimens truly extinct because we can no longer see them? Perhaps they have gone into hiding, only to “reappear” one day…