Spring Odyssey

2020

Artist : Elise Morin

Technical Direction : Vincent Malizia

Scientific collaboration : Jacqui Shykoff et Timothy Mousseau

Producers : Chloé Jarry and Charles Drouin

Production Manager : Alexandrine Stehelin

Production Assistant : Clélie Chassignet

Production : Lucid Realities and Tulipes & Cie

Co-production : France Télévisions

With the support of CNC-DICREAM & La Diagonale Paris-Saclay

In collaboration with scientists from the University of Paris-Saclay, the artist has worked on a tobacco plant capable of making radioactivity visible in an attempt to tame it. This attempt is essential for the continuation of life on earth but also for a possible conquest of space where radiation is higher.

The plant then traveled to one of the most radioactive places on earth: the “red forest” in Chernobyl, named after the pine needles that turned red after the explosion of the nuclear power plant. Since 1986, this territory has become a laboratory open only to scientific expeditions that are in charge of observing the effects of high levels of radiation and the absence of man on the environment. The plant was exposed for the five days prescribed in a clearing in the heart of the forest of particularly resistant birches.

Following this exposure, the plant has mutated. The hanging plants and the one in the center of the room, emerging from the pile of pine needles that have since disappeared from the red forest, come from this “mother” plant. This presence gives rise to hope. Once the VR helmet is worn, any action in reality has an impact in virtuality and vice versa. We come into contact with the mutant plant. We take care of it. In both worlds. Then begins a choreography that allows us to tame our fears and our limits.

The SPRING ODYSSEY VR experience breaks a boundary that the body could not naturally support. It is about inscribing this experience as a rite of passage towards a new physical reality mixing science and technology around a powerful invisible phenomenon and questioning the fluctuating limits of our intuitions. The VR experience gives an account of different levels of perception of this space that looks paradoxically so familiar and to tame this territory.

Between fragility, strength and resilience, our relationship to this world will be outlined through the complicity woven with the real and virtual mutant plant. A plurality of reading of the spaces and the elements which compose them incites to a renewal of the glance carried on the plants able to resist the various representations of the environments.

DURING RECTO VRSO 2023

Installation de réalité virtuelle

Discover the virtual reality artwork Spring Odyssey everyday from Wednesday to Sunday at Espace Mayenne.

Duration : 15 minutes

Number of attendees : 1

Elise Morin was born in 1978 and lives and works in Paris. Elise Morin develops an interdisciplinary practice rooted in ecological thinking that questions our relationship to the visible and to modes of coexistence. The devices of conception and production generate collaborations with scientists, local communities, engineers, musicians, philosophers. The choice of specific places and environments are intrinsic components of his work. They allow her to reflect on the relationship between creation and the common good, on the role of aesthetics in the understanding of other perceptions of a damaged earth. Elise Morin has exhibited in France at the Cent-quatre, the Jeu de Paume, the Grand Palais, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Bucharest, Moscow, Beijing and Tokyo. She studied at the École Nationale Su-périeure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, at Central Saint Martins College in London, and at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts in Tokyo.