Happiness is Dystopian: Clément Cogitore at the Espace Louis Vuitton in Venice

Trump's first election campaign, 2016, New York. The attention of the French artist Clément Cogitore, then 33, lingers on an election poster: there is a child, he looks at it, it remains imprinted in his mind. Shortly after, he enters a supermarket, he has to buy some food, his gaze is caught by an advertisement hanging on the walls of the store: the protagonist is the same child. It seems strange to him, almost impossible, but he is sure: it is him. So he begins to investigate and discovers the world of stock photo agencies - Shutterstock, Getty - and that way of selling one's image without having control over the use that will be made of it seems to him that it perfectly reflects the direction that society is taking.

“That child was used to sell a political ideology, but also a food product: the idea that it made no difference struck me a lot,” says Cogitore. He got to work and in 2018 created a video installation specifically for the Marcel Duchamp Prize, which then earned him the victory, giving a boost to his career. It is called The Evil Eye and soon became a fundamental element of his artistic path, today the protagonist of an exhibition dedicated to him at the Espace Louis Vuitton in Venice – on the third floor of the boutique behind San Marco – on the occasion of the 2025 Architecture Biennale . The exhibition is an integral part of the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s Hors-les-murs program, which takes place in dedicated spaces of the boutiques in Tokyo, Monaco, Venice, Beijing, Seoul and Osaka, fulfilling the commitment to create international projects and make them accessible to a wider audience – access, in fact, is free of charge.

The video is disturbing, it leaves a sense of uneasiness. In the alternation of archive footage held together by an apocalyptic narrative, it reveals the main strategies of mass manipulation and consumerism by showing a dystopian vision of happiness, designed to promote the tendency to accumulate. “Studying those databases I immediately realized how women were in the clear majority and so they became the protagonists of the film”. They smile often, but their smiles – decontextualized – communicate only fiction. “Everything is fake, happiness is a myth, but the human presence, on the other hand, is real”. The text dialogues with archaic myths, including the origin of evil.

And indeed a snake slithers through the rooms that house servers, insinuating a doubt: isn’t data the evil of our times? In the meantime, Clément Cogitore has grown up and in 2023 his feature film Goutte d’Or was selected at the Semaine de la Critique to represent France at the Oscars, and he is now preparing for a very special theatrical direction. But one thing is certain: “Seven years later, The Evil Eye is more relevant than ever”.