Spring Odyssey

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.