Codex Cosmos et Vanitas is a voluminous journal made up of 1,200 drawings that Ylva Snöfrid made daily between the winter solstices of 2020 and 2023. The journal is a means of collecting, organising and cultivating the artist’s thoughts, as well as materialising them in artistic form. The drawings have been gathered together and bound into three volumes focusing on the central themes of her work: Birth, Life and Death. The artist has invited Nicolas Bourriaud, curator and author, to share his reflections on the second volume of the journal: Life.
Nicolas Bourriaud is a curator and writer. As well as co-founding and co-directing the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (1999-2006), he was advisor to the founder of the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in Kiev (2003-2007) and the Gulbenkian Curator for Contemporary Art at Tate Britain in London (2007-2010). In 2010, he headed the planning department at the Ministry of culture in France, then became Director of the École Nationale SupĂ©rieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris ( 2011-2015). Between 2015 and 2021, he founded and directed MO.CO – Montpellier Contemporain, a new institution comprising the art center La PanacĂ©e, the ESBA art school and the HĂ´tel des Collections. He recently funded Radicants, a curatorial cooperative producing exhibitions worldwide, and is the Artistic Director of the 15th Gwangju Biennale in Korea.
He was part of the curatorial team of Aperto 1993 at the Venice Biennale, and has organized a number of international exhibitions, from Traffic (CAPC Bordeaux, 1996) to Planet B. Climate change and the New Sublime (Venice, 2022). He has also co-curated other biennials, including Lyon (2005), Moscow (2005 and 2007), Athens (2011), Taipei (2014), Kaunas (2015) and Istanbul (2019). He published Relational Aesthetics in 1998, and his latest book, Inclusions. Aesthetics of the anthropocene, was published in 2020.
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