Somewhere between rudimentary and science-fiction creations, Azzopardi’s ‘Non Technological Devices’ are objects made of natural materials. Their shape and form remind us of the devices that populate our daily lives, yet simultaneously, they propel us into other imaginaries and a world where the body and space can interact differently. Where the balance between us and other earthlings, between what is human and what is not, can be rewritten. These objects are as much prolongations of bodies as they are hindrances. Associated with invented artefacts whose use remains to be discovered, they create together a fictional universe that functions as a mirror held up to our fantasies of the future.

With this project Azzopardi wishes to create new desires, to generate images that can be resources for our imaginaries. How can we show an alternative future in the face of our dreams of a hyper-artificialised and technologised world? Using fiction and play, Azzopardi seeks other ways of imagining augmented lives, creating organic cyborgs whose aim would be to inscribe the body differently in the environment. She uses the poetic diversion of artefacts that are symbols of technical progress to question our relationship with the living and the disappearance of the earthly ‘resources’ used to build the components of our technological objects. 

Dealing with human intervention on nature, the environment, our relationship to technology and the overexploitation of the planet, Azzopardi’s work explores other forms of cohabitation with the earthly living and opens up avenues of reflection on what could be an iconography of ecological self-defence, in her enchanting surrealist imaginaries.

Artist Bio: 

Chloé Milos Azzopardi (b.1994, France) is a visual artist living on an island in the outskirts of Paris. She works on long term projects mixing photography, performance and installation. At the intersection of experimental and documentary photography, her images generate fictional worlds, whose strangeness and sensoriality are exacerbated. Her research revolves around ecology, new technologies and the construction of post-capitalocene imaginaries. She was recently awarded the prize ‘New writings of environmental photography’ at La Gacilly Festival, the Lucie Foundation's Emerging Artist grant, and was resident at Villa Perochon during the encounters of young international photography with Joan Fontcuberta. Her series ‘Non Technological Devices’ will be exhibited during Les Rencontres d'Arles with the Fisheye Gallery in July 2024. Her work has been published in magazines such as NYTimes, British Journal of Photography, Fisheye or Ignant, and was exhibited at PhMuseum, Łódź Fotofestiwal, Encontros da Imagem, InCadaqués, Landskrona Foto, Athens Photo Festival, InCadaqués, Krakow Photomonth, Noorderlicht Photo Festival.