HUMAN FREQUENCIES

When we speak, walk, breathe, work, love, stare or share a space, humans naturally begin to attune to one another. Our gestures, our rhythms, our movements, our emotions, our hormones respond to each other: it is what neuroscience calls “interpersonal synchronization.”

Human Frequencies aims to reflect on those choreographies of connection — on how human beings align, influence, and transform one another through the vibration within the space between them.

In 2005, the “social brain connectome” first appeared in research, but it was only after 2017 that The Original Social Network: White Matter and Social Cognition by Leo Schilbach and Computing the Social Brain Connectome Across Systems and States by Danilo Bzdok were published, as the two foundational papers on the subject.

We are living in a network of relationships through which gestures, vibrations, emotions, narratives and memories circulate. The individual is therefore not conceived as an isolated being, but as a person continually influenced and transformed by others.

In a world marked by isolation, social fragmentation, disparity of opportunity, and the dispersal of emotional attention, Human Frequencies questions art’s capacity to recreate experiences of presence, listening, and sharing.It aims to bring together works that make these bonds sensible: through interactions, performances, moving images, and sound. Experiencing the social connectome here must be part of the work itself; it must make us understand, must make us sense, that common tempo, the echoes in motion resonating from one body to another.

Yet the same forces that draw bodies into rhythm can just as easily throw them out of sync. The artworks presented in Human Frequencies describe how our devices often offer the appearance of company without the substance of it, leaving us paradoxically isolated in the middle of constant contact. A 2021 Stanford study by Jeremy Bailenson gave this a precise physiological explanation: video calls strip away the very cues — mutual gaze, natural timing, embodied mirroring — that our nervous systems rely on to fall into step with one another, replacing synchrony with a low hum of fatigue. Screens can carry a voice across the world and still fail to carry the rhythm underneath it.

With that in mind, and driven by the desire to connect human bodies, Abdoulaye Konaté’s meditative practice stitches fabrics together into a futuristic matrix grid look. Hands at work, together creating a web of connections relying on each other to exist. In L’aiguille et le fil rouge - motif de Tombouctou - Mali, red threads run down the black surface like a rhythm passed from one body to another, the very rhythm the screen fails to carry. At its centre, a white needle recalls a Bambara proverb: “If you do not become the needle that sews together the bonds of family, do not be the one who tears them apart.” White, red and black, the three colours of sacrifice in Africa, hold the work together. Konaté’s practice, working without digital technology, holds at once humanity’s past history and its present use.

Conversely, technology has also become one of the more inventive instruments for rebuilding that rhythm, especially among artists working across borders and generations. Anhar Salem studies religious habits across generations, in her close circle and in algorithms, turning a machine into a tool for validating religious practice.

And artists like Jermine Chua have turned the aesthetics of video-call screens into a way of showing how distance, language and emotional closeness now coexist. Technology, in this light, is not the opposite of presence — it is simply where presence goes to be tested. Here, the viewer becomes a subject of human experimentation.

Iván Argote, with humour and derision, questions perception in art experiences, going against the rules, questioning ideologies. The viewer thus becomes the main character of the work; the boundaries between everyday life and art are abolished, and the museum space becomes an intimate place of sharing and celebration. We dare you not to dance with the artist while watching Feeling.

While Chloe Bensahel’s Transplants and Lena Marie Emrich’s Ménage à Trois focus on the marginal and social aspects of human frequencies, both practices interweave performance, documentation and sculptural works — works that speak of the encounter between supposedly everyday objects and human longings, and preserve them in a simple formal language.

Human Frequencies seeks to remind us that we are never fully isolated. Our perceptions, our memories, and our ways of being and living on this planet are, and always will be, built or deconstructed with others.

Victoria Gandit-Lelandais