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Experiencing solastalgia is feeling homesick without having left your home. It’s having the impression that the landscape you know, the one you’ve built yourself on, is turning its back and drifting away. Not recognizing your environment because it’s changing too quickly. How do we deal with this terrifying necessity to question our view of the world, to reassess the way we inhabit it? This familiar world that is becoming unfamiliar… It’s a sublime and frightening opportunity to rethink the relationships we have with it.

In this performance, I propose a hypothesis: we would all be solastalgiac or would become so one day. To find a remedy, a common pharmacopoeia, I met with a few selected people—residents of the places where I’ve settled, as well as researchers, local government officials, or elected representatives. I gathered their impressions and their knowledge about their changing environment.

Wearing a virtual reality headset, with the content projected on a screen, I question our real environments through a virtual world. This digital space becomes a metaphor for our paradoxes. We see the disturbances affecting our landscapes, and yet we change so little. When you wear a virtual reality headset, you can run into a very real wall.

In this virtual space, I’ve gathered elements collected from my encounters (here an image, here a sound interview, here some text, etc.). The video projection from my headset is also interspersed with other content, various supports for my train of thought (mind maps, geographic maps, photos, texts, etc.). This digital environment, through which I interrogate our solastalgia, is both a place to escape from reality (to flee it?), and a means to “hide” from you in order to work on a more intimate aspect of writing (sometimes we hide to better show).