Before Hooves Grow considers the island as both a fantasy of escape and a site where isolation produces material change. Taking Madeira as its point of departure — historically imagined through narratives of abundance, cure, remoteness and reinvention — the exhibition places these projections alongside allopatric speciation, the evolutionary process through which geographically isolated populations gradually develop distinct characteristics.
Extending this process to the human body, the works imagine what prolonged isolation might produce: hooves adapted to steep terrain, or voices capable of travelling across mountains. Through this speculative evolution, the desire to escape and become otherwise is pushed towards an absurd conclusion: adaptation becomes so complete that departure may no longer be possible.
Île du Dôme
(2022)
Location
Capela da Boa Viagem, Funchal
Dates
2022
Materials / media
Mixed fabric, aluminium, ropes
Photo Credits
Hélder Folgado
Île du Dôme takes as its starting point the science-fiction graphic novel L’Île d’Auvergne (1993), which imagines a future in which rising water levels have transformed the Auvergne region into an archipelago. In this flooded landscape, the city of Liberty is built across the trunks and canopies of giant sequoias whose roots have adapted to permanent submersion. Despite the scale of the catastrophe, the human relationship to nature remains largely unchanged: survival is still organised through occupation, extraction and control.
Developed as a site-specific work for the Musée d’Art Roger-Quilliot, Île du Dôme proposes a different evolutionary response. Here, humans themselves become rooted: skin turns to bark or stone, bodies become static, and individuals merge with the landscape as living islands capable of supporting other forms of life. The work uses this speculative transformation to rethink ideas of adaptation, interdependence and communication, imagining a society no longer positioned above its environment, but physically embedded within it.
Before Hooves Grow considers the island as both a fantasy of escape and a site where isolation produces material change. Taking Madeira as its point of departure — historically imagined through narratives of abundance, cure, remoteness and reinvention — the exhibition places these projections alongside allopatric speciation, the evolutionary process through which geographically isolated populations gradually develop distinct characteristics.
Extending this process to the human body, the works imagine what prolonged isolation might produce: hooves adapted to steep terrain, or voices capable of travelling across mountains. Through this speculative evolution, the desire to escape and become otherwise is pushed towards an absurd conclusion: adaptation becomes so complete that departure may no longer be possible.
