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.
Location
Museé d'art Roger Quillot, Clermont-Ferrand
Dates
2022
Materials
Quilting tecnique on outdoor fabric
To Fill in a Gap, To Plug in a Hole or How to Postpone an Imminent Problem begins with a fabricated premise: that a 3.9 km tunnel once connected MUDAS.MACM and Galeria dos Prazeres, with the wood-fired ovens found in both spaces presented as its surviving entrances. Textile panels and sculptural elements extend this fiction, treating an unverified narrative as if it were archaeological fact and testing how easily absence can be filled by a convincing structure.
The sculptures are made from wood marked by disease, its damaged surfaces concealed while the material continues to change internally. This tension between appearance and instability runs throughout the exhibition, where repair, omission and fabrication become ways of negotiating what cannot be fully resolved. By collapsing real and invented histories, the work asks when filling a gap becomes a necessary act of connection, and when it becomes a way of postponing a problem that remains unresolved beneath the surface.
