Ecological Fiction: In Conversation with Noémie Goudal

In her exhibition titled Phoenix at the Rencontres d’Arles, Noémie Goudal's photographic series of the same name (2021) along with the moving image installations Inhale/Exhale (2021) and Below the Deep South (2021) engages with staging and illusion. Using both photography and film, Goudal's practice touches upon how our knowledge about the planet’s past and its present demand further scrutiny. The artist uses paleoclimatology as a means to devise ecological moments and occurrences that are fictional, yet deeply prescient; presenting some re-orienting truths about the planet’s fragile ecosystem. Her approach is an anthropological one, driven by both observation and participation. Associating with conceptions of “deep time” as opposed to “human time” is critical to her installations which, as she states, “…explore spatiotemporal vastness and post-anthropocentric modes of belonging.” Relying on imagination, intuition and empathy, the work equally brings together the conventional logic of science based on dualism and rationalism, making strange that very moment of encounter.

Her works presented here are about ecology but they also make one think about how the human is a critical and calibrated part of the natural system, even though absent in the imagery. The non-human elements—the natural world printed on paper—are given precedence and offer ways of refocusing on the planet as a living-being that has a way of regulating, self-discerning and communicating its life and pain. The scenography of the work is considered by the artist as a “window” to a world which has been constructed within a desacralised church, as she effectively uses the height of the structure and the gossamer light that filters through some of the windows to accentuate the shifts that have been caused by climate change. The spectator—as she mentions in this audio clip—is invited into a “voyage” through a newly constructed world, and the architecture within which it is placed is a “language,” a system of communication expressed through a particular “grammar” and “idiom.”

The work inextricably makes one think about vitality, causality and intentionality. It brings to mind the contrast between the hospitable and harmonious, science and art, form and void, movement and stillness, the natural and the anthropological—generating a profound material, social and psychological interdependence.

Recorded on 6 July 2022. 

To read more about Rencontres d'Arles, please click here and here.