Paradis

Paradis – A Cabinet of Curiosities – or Wunderkammer – exhibits a wide variety of objects and artifacts with a particular notion for the rare, eclectic and esoteric. Through their selection of objects, they tell a particular story about how humans perceive the natural and cultural world.

Inspired by this way of collecting, Oriane Thomasson (FR) has created Paradis, where science and art, the natural and the artificial, meet to produce a new fiction. The collection is a mosaic of photographic works and archival documents. From images made during his travels in the Far East to botanical and mineralogical illustrations.

Paradis examines the different materialities of images and how they influence our imagination. The work questions the concept of nature through its representations, and the myths of Western societies that arise from them. As a modern explorer, Thomasson gathers what she has discovered and assembles the images into a new narrative through which we wander.

A fictional text is woven through the images, in which the reader is led to an unknown land, like an explorer discovering mysterious and unknown lands. Paradise is an invitation to rediscover the capacity of nature to make us imagine, dream and build new stories.