Tout Est Bien Qui Finit Bien
Atelier Concorde, Lisbon (PT)
2024


Suspended between presence and disappearance, Tout Est Bien Qui Finit Bien unfolds as a meditation on the thresholds that define human existence. Glass vessels enclose charred fragments of paper—testimonies that have survived combustion and are held in place by metallic rods, as if caught mid-transition. Nearby, mirrors scatter and retrieve these remnants, projecting them into newly formed constellations. Each component asserts its own material logic while quietly suggesting another order of reality.

At the center of the installation lies a question borrowed from the 2023 Holberg Debate: “What makes us more than complex biological objects?” Rather than seeking resolution, Diane Giraud allows this inquiry to resonate throughout the space, where the visual and auditory elements converge to evoke a mutable continuum between life, matter, and meaning.

Encircling the work is an audio dialogue - titled To The Rest Of Us - between Giraud and “Tony”, an AI counterpart generated with the artist’s own voice. The exchange neither affirms nor denies identity; instead, it reveals a shifting terrain where authorship, agency, and consciousness resist fixed definition. Here, AI is not confronted as instrument or threat but acknowledged as a cohabitant - an emerging presence shaping contemporary subjectivity.

Giraud’s installation avoids declarative certainty. It operates through trace, echo, and suggestion, inviting visitors to occupy a state of attentive ambiguity. A handwritten note taped to the mirror “I just want you to listen”, recalls a modest yet radical gesture: to receive without demanding mastery.

Influences - from early science-fiction imaginaries to artistic explorations of distributed consciousness - surface not as references but as sediment. They remind us that what was once speculative has already entered the everyday, blurring the distinction between the fictional and the real.

Tout Est Bien Qui Finit Bien does not conclude; it lingers. Its title, borrowed from a familiar expression of closure, gently destabilizes the promise it carries, proposing instead that endings are porous, incomplete, and always beginning again. This gesture resonates with Voltaire’s Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne, in which he invokes the very saying “tout est bien qui finit bien” only to refute it, using the devastation of the Lisbon earthquake to dismantle the optimistic philosophies of his time. In the installation, this historical echo becomes part of a wider web of associations: a reminder that meaning emerges through interconnection — between words, materials, histories, and presences that continue to reconfigure one another.

Tout Est Bien Qui Finit Bien
Atelier Concorde, Lisbon (PT)
2024
Installation with glass artworks, burnt papers, mirrors
+ Audio piece To The Rest Of Us (30 min 52 sec)
- The first conversation between Diane and Tony
In partnership with Vidreira 1960