Medusa

Medusa takes its title from Théodore Géricault’s the Raft of the Medusa of 1818 and uses extracts from Georg Buchner’s Danton’s Death of 1835. It re-imagines the experience of climate refugees from the perspective of the ocean itself as they desperately flee across the oceanic waves in search of a new life. The waves transform into increasingly larger oceanic walls and immerse the viewer in the interior of their motion, a seismic effect of melting Antarctic and Arctic ice. A haunting voice invites the solitary viewer to watch the unfamiliar oceanic terrain from the top of a two metre high viewing platform. It questions the viewer, as if their certainties are pushing the oceanic walls around them closer. It is installed as an architectural installation in a section of the former 1740 Savoy cavalry headquarters in the centre of Turin.

Medusa avoids representing the refugees themselves but focuses on their unprecedented experiences. It offers as its subject the oceanic experience of a Syrian refugee, her terrifying ocean crossing from Indonesia to Australia, the disconcerting sounds of rescue by a Norwegian tanker helicopter and subsequent refusal of entry to Australia. However there are no images of the refugee. Instead we are con-fronted by the climate itself, in the form of an unpredictable ocean whose behavior interacts with the audience’s uncertain movement across the installation space. Here, the possible is twofold, the oceanic and the human. In the installation, the immersive oceanic projection is algorithmic and goal oriented, based on an AI language that animates the unanticipated. The human is tentative, as the audience attempts to navigate its way across the totally unfamiliar oceanic terrain. Paradoxically, this refugee experience foreshadows the unimaginable one we all increasingly face as the planet and its atmosphere burn in unforeseen ways.