Description
OD Photo Prize 2023 | Shortlisted Artist
“Beyond their clear aesthetic beauty, what struck me most about Chloe Milos Azzopardi’s pictures in this series is how profoundly moving they are. Gently visually reminiscent of the cult performance and land artists of the 60s and 70s (arguably one of the most seminal periods of experimentation and discovery in photo history), these works are likely to linger with viewers in a similar way, buzzing with a certain prophetic energy. What I love about them most is how they almost seem to have tumbled from some eco-sci-fi film or book, offering us an emotive vision of our humanity and how we connect with the environment today.“ – Joanna Cresswell
Selected by Joanna Cresswell
Writer, researcher and editor
Chloé Azzopardi [b. 1994] is a visual artist living on an island in the outskirts of Paris. She works on long term projects mixing photography, performance and installation. At the intersection of experimental and documentary photography, her images generate fictional worlds, whose strangeness and sensoriality are exacerbated. Her research revolves around ecology, new technologies and the construction of post-capitalocene imaginaries.
Artist Statement | “Non technological devices » are composite tools made from gleaned natural elements, assembled to mimic the technological devices that populate our daily lives. Between rudimentary productions and science-fiction creations, these objects are as much prolongations of bodies as they are hindrances. Associated with invented artefacts whose use remains to be discovered, they create together a fictional universe that functions as a mirror held up to our fantasies of the future.
With this project the artist wishes to create new desires, to generate images that can be resources for our imaginaries. How can we show an alternative future in the face of our dreams of a hyper-artificialized and technologized world? Using fiction and play, Azzopardi seeks other ways of imagining augmented lives, creating organic cyborgs whose aim would be to inscribe the body differently in the environment. She uses the poetic diversion of artefacts that are symbols of technical progress to question our relationship with the living and the disappearance of the earthly “resources” used to build the components of our technological objects. Dealing with human intervention on nature, our relationship to technology and the overexploitation of the planet, this research explore other forms of cohabitation with the earthly living and opens up avenues of reflection on what could be an iconography of ecological self-defence.” – Chloé Azzopardi
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