From Somewhere to Nowhere

2021. Video installation, photography

Installation view at Centre Intermonde, La Rochelle, France

The human being is "inside" a space that surrounds them: the environment. Their interactions with it pass through different senses,

such as sight, smell, hearing, or touch. Thus, we feel the existence of the earth beneath our feet. We also sense smells carried by

the wind. We capture various colors in the varied horizons of the sky that embraces us. Alas, scientific methodologies tend to separate

us from our environment. Indeed, these scientific knowledge and new technologies place us outside of it, creating a parallel world

where the environment is only numbers, sounds, visuals, videos, or even works of art. All of this prevents us from living certain

experiences within our own environment. Man then becomes a being who lives "on" the surface of the globe, only superficially.

​As a result, man withdraws from the world in which he lives, no longer being an integral part of his environment. We become strangers

and distant from it. The world is exclusively perceived as "natural resources" whose existence is totally independent of that of man.

These resources are on standby, waiting to be exploited by capital. "Sustainable development" is nothing more than a discourse

justifying the massive exploitation of the environment, completely ignoring the glaring inequality between "exploited" and "exploiters."

The great discourse of sustainable development aims to protect the planet in the same way that large companies defend it: their own

interests taking absolute priority. These companies preserve what they consider their resources, constituting a real pledge for their future.

These resources are considered inexhaustible because societies manage and control them according to their sustainable development

discourse, taking into account the issues of the past, present, and future.

​In many cases, the preservation of these resources, whose ultimate goal is the accumulation of capital, tends to displace the inhabitants

from "inside" to "outside" the environment, thus depriving them of their responsibility towards this world. The inhabitants are cut off from

their environment. The world as an environment thus becomes an unknown and inaccessible terrain. This unknown terrain also constitutes

a mysterious sphere in the modern world where values aimed at increasing capital are acclaimed in order to threaten and alienate us.

According to these values, a lazy person is one who refuses to work, in other words, to exchange their ability to work for remuneration.

Someone who escapes the immense regulations and controls exercised by the Nation-State will also be considered a traitor or a terrorist.

A person who does not strive for material success is systematically perceived as a failure. But cannot we consider that escaping from this

system of false values in order to reach an unknown destination is actually a way to return to the inside of our environment, from which the

modern world had managed to deprive us?

Text by Pana Kantha

The Project is supported by Thaillywood Foundation and Centre Intermondes.