Île du Dôme
(2022)
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.
O’ mice an’ men takes as its starting point the discovery of Mus musculus remains at Ponta de São Lourenço, Madeira, radiocarbon-dated to around 1030 AD — several centuries before the Portuguese settlement of the archipelago. Genetic similarities between Madeira’s house mice and populations from Northern Europe have prompted the hypothesis that mice may have reached the island aboard Viking vessels, although no archaeological evidence has confirmed a human presence. Their arrival nevertheless points to an early instance of human-mediated species introduction and its lasting impact on an isolated ecosystem.
From this uncertain history, the exhibition examines the entangled relationship between humans and mice: a species we transport, sustain and enable to thrive, while simultaneously attempting to exclude it from the spaces we inhabit. Drawing on traps, deterrents and the often absurd strategies devised to control rodents, the works approach the mouse as both unwanted intruder and persistent companion. O’ mice an’ men considers this ongoing struggle as one of unintended coexistence, in which attempts at control are continually undermined by the adaptability of the species they seek to contain.
Location
Museé d'art Roger Quillot, Clermont-Ferrand
Dates
2022
Materials
Quilting tecnique on outdoor fabric
Shown during PARALLEL VIENNA in 2019 with
