THE ARTIST
Elise Morin is born in 1978. She lives and works in Paris.
She develops an interdisciplinary practice rooted in ecological thinking that questions our relationship to the visible and to types of coexistence. The design and production processes generate collaborations with scientists, local communities, engineers, musicians and philosophers. The choice of specific places and environments are intrinsic components of her work. They enable reflection on the relationship of creation to the common good, on the role of esthetics in understanding other perceptions of a damaged world.
Elise Morin has notably exhibited in France at the Centquatre, the Jeu de Paume, the Grand Palais, the Museum of Contemporary Art of the city of Bucharest, Mos- cow and the city of Tokyo.
Trained at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Central Saint Martins College in London, and the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts in Tokyo.
THE WORK
Spring Odyssey is a global project that offers a space between reality and virtuality, a mixed experience around the invisibility of radioactivity. In collaboration with biologists, the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) experts are trying to discover the secret of resistance to radioactivity, an essential skill to survive a hypothetical humanity projected into space.
This secret is probably hidden in specific terrestrial radioactive landscapes: the Ukrainian Red Forest is converted into an open-air laboratory where potential solutions can be tested out: concepts of progress and nature are confronted. All inventions at some level involve manipulating natural materials, but supposedly in a way that involves creative imagination or at least serendipitous discovery.
The Spring Odyssey project is based on two independent researches that can be combined or not:
The creation of a specific plant reactive to radioactive stress will act as a revelator of this invisible force. It will be subject to these real, fictional and virtual environments. Young shoots of nicotiana taba-cum carrying a natural mutation are currently grown and developed in a laboratory to become bio-indicators, a contemporary version of a canary in a coal mine of the nineteenth century, or an organic Geiger counter.
The red forest VR experience is a way to break a border that the body could not support naturally. A rite of passage to a new physical reality that blends myths, science and technology around a powerful invisible phenomenon and to question the fluctuating limits of our intuitions. Scientific and artistic documents (photography, drawings, videos, sounds) support the deployment of the project.
Spring Odyssey aims to materialize it into a poetic object, alive and functional, to help place this essen-tial issue in the context of a current situation, a landscape and to start giving thought acceleration the search for solutions and to create collective memory networks.
CREDITS
Artistic collaboration: Daniel Nicolaevsky Maria
Music : Tyondai Braxton / Scout1 / Hive1
Director of photography : Vincent Malizia
Dronist : Anthony Clergue
Editing : Clémentine Schmidt & Nicolas Morin
With the support of Lucid Realities & Jérôme Peyrataud / Lhoist France Ouest – Usine de Sauveterre