Île du Dôme
(2022)
Happily Ever After examines the relationship between optimism, apathy and the persistent idea of life as a linear progression towards resolution — a point at which everything finally falls into place. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s notion of ‘cruel optimism’, the exhibition considers hope, superstition and small gestures of reassurance as ways of navigating uncertainty, while questioning when these might also become forms of stasis.
Through a series of small-scale wall sculptures and a textile installation structured around the phases of the moon, Happily Ever After sets the promise of a definitive ending against cycles of growth, decline and renewal. Moving between humour, anxiety and hope, the exhibition asks what remains when the promise of ‘happily ever after’ gives way to a continuous process of beginning again.
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
Materials / media
Quilting tecnique on outdoor fabric
Dates
2022
Happily Ever After examines the relationship between optimism, apathy and the persistent idea of life as a linear progression towards resolution — a point at which everything finally falls into place. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s notion of ‘cruel optimism’, the exhibition considers hope, superstition and small gestures of reassurance as ways of navigating uncertainty, while questioning when these might also become forms of stasis.
Through a series of small-scale wall sculptures and a textile installation structured around the phases of the moon, Happily Ever After sets the promise of a definitive ending against cycles of growth, decline and renewal. Moving between humour, anxiety and hope, the exhibition asks what remains when the promise of ‘happily ever after’ gives way to a continuous process of beginning again.
Happily Ever After examines the relationship between optimism, apathy and the persistent idea of life as a linear progression towards resolution — a point at which everything finally falls into place. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s notion of ‘cruel optimism’, the exhibition considers hope, superstition and small gestures of reassurance as ways of navigating uncertainty, while questioning when these might also become forms of stasis.
Through a series of small-scale wall sculptures and a textile installation structured around the phases of the moon, Happily Ever After sets the promise of a definitive ending against cycles of growth, decline and renewal. Moving between humour, anxiety and hope, the exhibition asks what remains when the promise of ‘happily ever after’ gives way to a continuous process of beginning again.