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Golnaz Behrouznia and Dominique Peysson, in collaboration with the scenographer Rémi Boulnois, propose an itinerary featuring 12 of their works, from which they create a logic between fiction and natural science.

They were inspired by the work of the biologist Alexander Braun when he stated that "Youth and old age are organic and spiritual forces that are constantly at work and that constantly oppose each other". Extending this reflection, they imagine a process of de-evolution, the possibility for species to go back up the phylogenetic tree to their origins : a "Reverse Phylogenesis". Not understood as a regression, but as a way of rediscovering of the first forms of life and of exploring other ways of being in the world.

Reverse Phylogenesis offers a luminous tour in the dark, allowing visitors to discover moving images, animated sculptures, motorized devices, fossilized traces, micro-fluidic fluids, a levitating drop…

The combination of visual, audio, digital and textual forms creates the atmosphere of a “parallel museum of natural history”. Unknown entities, that try out different ways of feeding, moving, metamorphosing, interacting with their environment. The tubular minimalist scenography recalls the structure of amino acids. Labels accompany pieces, a temporal diagram, allows to situate the evolutionary state of the organisms in to the geological eras. The exhibition ends at time zero, the point of origin of the thread of life.

Reverse Phylogenesis leads us to imagine living beings which escapes classification, in order to encourage us to renew our conception of life. It questions the forms emerging from our contemporary imagination, mixing the living and the artificial. A work that leads visitors to question our place in phylogenetic evolution, and the fate of ecosystems on Earth. A step aside to talk about ecology and science differently, re-enchanting the public with life and its processes by opening the doors to a phantasmagorical world.