Event
Realia | The symbiotic future in the digital art of Sabrina Ratté at MEET
A Canadian from Quebec City, Sabrina Ratté began working with digital art in the early 2000s, intrigued by the audio-visual technologies of the time, the earlier experimentation of early video artists and their use of acerbic, immediate and highly experimental technologies.
Her work evolved with the creation of surreal and poetically dystopian worlds, often inspired by the work of contemporary philosophers, and by an imagination prompted by themes of speculative evolution and the convergence of biology and technology.
On view: the symbiotic future of Sabrina Ratté
Realia brings together four works – Floralia (2021), Inflorescences (2023), Plane of Incidence (2024), and Cyberdelia (2024) – that synthesize Sabrina Ratté’s recent thematic journeys. The common denominator is a disruptive poetics that manages to meet the most urgent contemporary topics with grace and great aesthetic accuracy. The changing environment, the climate crisis, technological waste: all signs of a civilization struggling to come to terms with itself and its compulsion to ignore, hiding in wastelands the waste and problems it has created.
Sabrina Ratté goes a step further. She turns the inevitable seduction of dystopian vision into poetry, inspired by the philosophycal work of Glenn Albrecht and Donna Haraway. The two thinkers systematically remedy the contemporary crisis by proposing the advent of an evolutionary symbiosis in which man and nature coexist in a mutual relationship of unexpected and uncontrollable creation. We no longer speak of the Anthropocene , for we are at the advent of the Symbiocene. An era in which the concept of “monstrous” regains its original meaning: wonder, regeneration, awe and new beauty.
Floralia, Sabrina Ratté, 2021
From the macro to the micro, digital memory as a tool for knowledge
Hence comes Floralia, the four-part work that will inhabit MEET’s immersive room. The set is a speculative future, where specimens of now-extinct plant species are preserved and displayed in a virtual archive room. Through montage and visual strategies, the space is transformed under the effect of interferences caused by the memory emanating from the catalogued plants, revealing traces of a past that continues to inhabit the place. Floralia is a simulation of ecosystems created by the fusion of technology and organic matter, where past and future coexist in a perpetual tension in the present.
The artist then turns his attention to the ambiguous theme of memory. In a transformed world, how will we remember plants and flowers and experience them aesthetically? In the worlds imagined by the artist, knowledge is a path to intimacy with natural matter. An explosion that marks the path from the macro to the micro, to approach, to observe, to know.
Galleries 1, 2 and 3 of MEET will display the other works in the exhibition.
The artist then turns his attention to the ambiguous theme of memory. In a transformed world, how will we remember plants and flowers and experience them aesthetically? In the worlds imagined by the artist, knowledge is a path to intimacy with natural matter. An explosion that marks the path from the macro to the micro, to approach, to observe, to know.
Inflorescences (2023)
Inflorescences imagines a future in which plants, fungi, and unknown creatures mutate to coexist with e-waste, transforming waste into new ecological relationships. The installation explores a post-human world, shaped by the remnants of human activities.
Videos show hybrid and unpredictable organisms, with forms that evoke floral or fungal mutations, emerging from abandoned textures and materials. Inflorescences reflects on the evolution of ecosystems in the Anthropocene, where living and nonliving merge to redefine the future.
Cyberdelia (2024)
Cyberdelia, conceived by Sabrina Ratté during an art residency at the Sporobole Center, explores the creative potential of artificial intelligence. The installation includes 22 videos with soundscapes co-composed by Roger Tellier-Craig and an AI, accompanied by 22 cards inspired by the major arcana of the tarot.
Visitors consult the oracle by choosing a card and activating the corresponding video, resulting in a dialogue with the unknown that interweaves randomness and intention. Paying homage to the cyberculture of the 1980s-1990s, Cyberdelia reflects on the relationship between humans and AI, offering visions that mix technology, nature and collective imagination.
Plane of Incidence (2024)
Plane of Incidence investigates the relationship between object, living, and speculative evolution, drawing inspiration from concepts such as animism and Lynn Margulis’s Interliving. Abandoned objects found in Montréal and Marseille have been digitized and integrated into virtual environments, merging with the living to generate new life forms.
The work imagines unpredictable trajectories of evolution, exploring the transformative agent of objects and their connections to the organic, evoking scenarios that amaze and disturb.
For the first time in Italy after many digital art capitals
Sabrina Ratté’s work has been exhibited at the Laforet Museum in Tokyo, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the PHI Center in Montreal, the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl, and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. He has presented solo exhibitions at Gaîté Lyrique in Paris, Fotografiska in Shanghai, and Arsenal Contemporary Art in Montreal and New York. Notably, his works are part of the collection of the Montreal Contemporary Art Museum.
