Chloé Milos Azzopardi

Poetics Aesthetics Composition series
HIDDEN Bořivojova
1. 3. / 23. 5. 2022

HIDDEN is thrilled to announce the first solo exhibition of French photographer Chloé Milos Azzopardi (1994), which is part of the Poetics, Aesthetics, Composition series.

"Écosystèmes" is a futuristic fable in which identities become porous and metamorphoses possible, a research about how we can imagine new interspecies relationships in a post-capitalocene era.

For a long time, Western philosophy has done everything to distinguish human from animal, nature from culture to the point of thinking we were above the sphere of the living if not outside it. This way of defining ourselves by extracting humankind from the living has led to seeing nature as an available 'resource' without considering our interdependencies and common vulnerabilities.

The term Capitalocene refers to a geological era the Earth entered in the 19th. It designates the unprecedented environmental transformations triggered by human activity in overdeveloped countries such as global warming, thinning of the ozone layer, ocean acidification, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, air pollution, melting of the ice caps... In this work I try to project myself after this era in order to create imaginaries capable of going beyond the objectification of the living and to repair our relationship with it. I explore the relationships between human and non-human beings, trying to escape a prism of utility or servitude and seeking instead to identify the common forms that go through us.

What does poetics mean to you?

Poetics is a way of being constantly open to the multitudes, to the microscopic as well as the macroscopic, to the foreign as well as the familiar. It is for example being able to feel the radical otherness of an animal without immediately entering into a relationship of domination with it and instead to recognize ourselves in this otherness. Being able to feel that when we observe other living beings, we are also the observed, even if what is around us does not necessarily have eyes.

What does aesthetics mean to you?

Aesthetics is for me a moving thing. Something that we pursue like a quest to go deeper and deeper into our perception and our sensations. My own aesthetic research is often linked to color. It's like looking for the most vibrant color, or the most shades, only to dive in and get giddy. After each encounter with a color, the eye can dive deeper and then the search becomes infinite.

What does composition mean to you?

I remember a friend from art school saying that he wanted to hang his paintings so you could feel the air flowing between them. I think it’s the best definition of composition I’ve heard. The science or intelligence of the air that circulates between things and makes them meet.