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

NOÉMIE GOUDAL
Study on Immersion, 2021

Drawn from specific originary theories regarding the evolution of the earth, the artist performs a critique of environmental degradation, invoking natural calamities and the man-made disasters that are largely responsible for the climatic shifts we experience today. The images are printed on large strips of paper, placed within the forest/studio and set on fire. Deploying various cinematic approaches and painterly techniques such as trompe-l’oeil – the technique of using highly realistic imagery to create optical illusions – the artist choreographs the moment of the images’ destruction, this trauma heightened by amplified jungle sounds. The work crosses the threshold between reality and fiction, and places the human spectator within as well as outside the course of nature, signifying our complicity and our culpability with regard to the irreversible, harrowing environmental destruction witnessed daily in the anthropocene epoch.