A Consilience is a film installation for two screens. It was first shown at the Natural History Museum in London in January 2000. Fabre was allowed to film there in rooms not accessible to the public. Amidst animals and organs preserved in alcohol we see several elderly scientists metamorphosing into a butterfly, a wasp and two sorts of fly. Then they start dancing and talking and thereby illustrating the theories they have been researching for so long. *

Consilience refers to certain types of knowledge systems. The entomologist, philosopher and sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson explains the expression as follows: 'A consilience is a 'jumping together' of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation'.** In other words consiliences emerge from the transfer of systems, elements and formations from one area to another. They are clashes between systems in which parallel elements turn up.* They are overlapping areas of knowledge from which a new understanding arises.

The installation entitled A Meeting / Vstrecha is one such overlapping area of knowledge where the art of the amateur entomologist Jan Fabre connects with scientific theory. We find the strongest consilience in the soundtrack. Instead of the light flapping of imitation wings we hear the amplified sounds of insects. When amplified so much, these sounds seem to us like strange, dark and dangerous machines. Machinations from another world. Fabre and the scientists try to temper the threat they pose by means of mimicry.* By imitating insects and their own theories about insects, the scientists try to conjure up this other world and make it their own. Salvation lies in a metamorphosis into an artist, someone who has the capacity to create an image of the world as a poetic reality. Fabre calls it 'simplexity': a supreme garbling of the complexity, perplexity and simplicity of the image.*