Terra Nullius/Nobody’s Land: Excavation from Image 3.0
Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa

BRODBECK & DE BARBUAT
The Thousand Lives of Isis, 2019 – 2021

This work is the first chapter of an ongoing project that draws on Egyptian mythology. Considered the divine mother of the pharaohs, Isis was a goddess in the religion of ancient Egypt, able to destroy and create worlds, and help the dead to enter the afterlife. She prevailed as a powerful, influential deity throughout the Graeco-Roman and wider Mediterranean world till the ritual worship of her ceased with the rise of Christianity from the fourth to the sixth centuries CE. The artists present a set of thirteen photographs depicting a European woman who is in fact a fully virtual character built through different digital techniques, including 3D-CGI modelling, scanning and analogue prints. Embracing and underscoring a hybrid aesthetic, the work is supported by a short video that depicts the combining of textures and processes through which Isis achieves this contemporary incarnation.