In PHOTOFAIRS Shanghai 2021, French artist Elise Morin, represented by Gaotai Gallery (Urumqi), presented her works in the Insights exhibition, curated by Yining He. Her works fitted the title Imaging Our Futures well. In this ARTIST VOICE, we focus on Elise Morin and her body of work Spring Odyssey. As a global project, Spring Odyssey offers a space between reality and virtuality, a mixed experience around the invisibility of radioactivity.
Elise Morin
Elise Morin was born in 1978 and 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 co-existence. 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.
© Elise Morin, Mapping the Red Forest from Spring Odyssey, 2020. Courtesy of GAOTAI Gallery (Urumqi)
Spring Odyssey focuses on the collaboration between NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) experts and biologists who are trying to discover the secret of resistance to radioactivity. In this work, Morin put her eyes on the red forest located less than a kilometer away from the Chernobyl power station. The so-called red forest is one of the places on Earth where radioactivity levels hit the highest spots. It inherited its name as the needles of the pines that grew in the area turned red as a result of the massive radiation absorption caused by the explosion of the Chernobyl power station in 1986. Today, the red forest has become an open-air laboratory for scientists to test possible solutions.
© Elise Morin, Mapping the Red Forest from Spring Odyssey, 2020. Courtesy of GAOTAI Gallery (Urumqi)
If, for many of us, the red forest is a symbol of disaster, the global Spring Odyssey project chooses to look at the plants that actually live with radiation. It is not about denying the ecological disaster that happened there, but rethinking our place within nature and the world. It is about positioning ourselves as equals with all beings – human, animal, plants, mineral, technological or even radioactive waste.
© Elise Morin, Spring Odyssey, Video Performance, 2020. Courtesy of GAOTAI Gallery (Urumqi)
The Spring Odyssey project is based on two independent pieces of research 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. Young shoots of nicotiana tabacum 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. 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 essential issue in the context of today, a landscape and to start giving thought acceleration the search for solutions and to create collective memory networks.
