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According to myth, Hyperborea is a fantastical island on the edge of the world, with an unknown location. It’s a place of the imagination, conducive to dreams and fantastical, mystical projections. It is said to be located in the far north, beyond the Arctic Circle, well beyond the reach of the cold Boreas, the north wind. This polar zone is also a perpetually shifting territory, strongly affected by the fluctuations of the living world, a geographical location that unites our artistic and technical interests.

With this project, we’re interested in the notion of metamorphosis as a space of hybridity, as a relationship between the human and the non-human. The living and the inanimate acquire an equivalent status, that of matter « occupied », « inhabited », « infused » or even « haunted » by the spirit of exploration. This spirit takes whatever form we dare to lend it. It’s all about the edges, the moving, and moving, lines, that transform a landscape into a character. Hyperborea would be an exploration of the landscape-character, of the cohabitation of the visible and the invisible. Our aim is to bring to life this metamorphosed in-between, this transitory no-man’s-land that reveals the instability of forms.

The Hyperborea installation draws its inspiration from a text by philosopher and writer Marielle Macé, Paysages incertains, from which the following extract is taken:

To live in this damaged world is to inhabit inherently uncertain landscapes. Not necessarily hostile, not always polluted, rarely even without beauty; but uncertain, ambiguous, unclear, troubled, shady. Environments of increasing instability and precariousness. Great lacerations of life lines and death lines, woven with waste, ghosts, forgetfulness, contamination and danger, but also with dreams, potentialities and surprises. Landscapes that we don't understand, that we misunderstand (intertwining contradictory lines, intertwining times, made of burials and resurgences, with blurred, shifting borders); landscapes of which we don't really know what they're made of, whose components we don't grasp; landscapes of which we don't know if they're viable (healthy, stable, durable); of which we don't know if they're reliable either: we don't know if we'll be able to live in them, we don't know if we can really count on them...