Pauline Julier: Naturalis Historia

“Naturalis Historia” is an installation by that combines nature stories through a number of sound and visual devices. The artwork investigates the relationship between humans and nature through a narrative and documentary approach.

“Naturalis Historia defends the idea that humans, seeking to shape a raw, changing world, confine it with their categories of thought, which lend it a certain stability. I want to stress how much the concepts that are used to organize the diversity of the world are our own; we produce them and with them the risk of emptying the world of its essence by freezing it in a catalogue of images, landscapes, definitions, and resolutions (scientific, religious, etc.) It is the same movement as that of the volcano that snuffs out life by freezing a forest or city in place. The same drive as that of the photographic image which slices up the “real” and thus plays a part in holding in place a world to be seen and understood. It is the same illusion of the continuity of movement produced by the film image. The world is emptied of its raw vitality and organized according to representational codes that are inevitably anthropized.” Pauline Julier