At first glance, there is little to see. A visitor wearing a vertically suspended Oculus Rift headset circles blindly, seemingly observing a virtual world arranged for their sole attention. When our turn comes, we put the Oculus on our head, and a jagged landscape of virgin forest opens up to our gaze, limitless, immeasurable. Each twig, each leaf, each shrub is rendered in white stereoscopic dots on a black background, a spatialized cartography of the infinite diversity of a world where nature alone defines its laws and has installed age-old balances. The technical device follows our steps. When we look up, we find ourselves in the centre of a tree, whose ramifications can be seen from the inside. Our viewer’s body passes through the place and disappears, like a pure spirit, a consciousness capable of perceiving everything about the magnificently complex structures of the ecosystem without giving us the power to modify them. The Catalan-born Brazilian artist Daniel Steegmann Mangrané has carried out a high-precision 3D scan of almost 1,000 square metres in the heart of the primeval Mata Atlântica forest in southwestern Brazil. For those who allow themselves to be caught up in this dizzying contemplation, his installation Phantom (Kingdom of all animals and all beasts in my name) is above all an experience of self-consciousness, of a realm where all the surrounding living matter merges like a gigantic network of invisible energies.

Exhibitions