Île du Dôme
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
Shown during PARALLEL VIENNA in 2019 with
There Is An Elephant In This Room (2019) is formed by 5 textile panels that, when joined together to form a single larger panel, measures 2.40 x 4.5 m – the same measurements of an average sized male adult Asian Elephant. This work was based on the English language expression, “the elephant in the room”, which refers to a highly obvious problem that no one is willing to address. It was executed following the simple premise of hiding the outline of the animal in plain sight, in a room that has the exact same height as the average Asian Elephant – 2.40m. Different abstract patterns are seen on the back of each panel in order to mislead the viewer into overlooking the elephant. The Asian elephant has been listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List since 1986.

