Eva Medin explores the relationship between art historical forms, speculative science fiction narratives, animistic beliefs and the power of the sublime. Splicing together these various strands in her projects, she generates immersive environments that render visible the awareness of an epochal shift in terms of status between art and activism. The artist regularly refers to the term ‘solastalgia’, a form of melancholy that can suddenly stop any action in its tracks and which reflects the desire to anchor oneself once more and to reconnect with the very Earth we live on. For Eva Medin, the human being is an entity among others, a part of the world’s consciousness on equal footing with forces, organisms and essences who are linked by interactions that, though invisible, are continuous and omnipresent.

While modernity has given rise to geometrized spaces, and a strict division of roles and species – process that respond to an all-too-human will to power – a change of era could allow for a radical reconfiguration of the links between the physical and the immaterial. If such a world were to appear, what fundamental forms of life might emerge along with it in it? By revisiting the imaginaries of mutation and metamorphosis, Eva Medin underscores both the anticipatory character of the great narratives of our time and the evocative power of popular culture, which readily imagines hybrids of man and fly, robot and policeman, flesh and technology, the earth and the sacred. Each of these new aglommerations is composito – part plant, part architecture, part ruderal kingdom, part new age of metal, – and in a state of flux that never settling permanently into any one condition. They evolve within a wider landscape, one which, in the words of J. G. Ballard in La Foire aux atrocités, is a “formalization of space and time reflecting an interior state of mind” – the environment as a symbolic code.

In this way, Eva Medin makes extensive use of fiction and science fiction, but always as part of an acerbic reading of the present. Specially devised scenography and cinematic special effects are used here to create a three-dimensional relief tableau: as they make their way through this immersive space, visitors discover the different aspects of the work, sink into the strata of a fictional geological history, and are transformed in turn into active elements of the exhibition and in the transformation of consciousness in our age of absolute uncertainty.

With the support of Galerie Liusa Wang (Paris).