Oriane Thomasson conceived this photographic project as a proposal to rethink our relationship with nature. The photographs that she took for Paradis show us a virgin natural world, intact, as at the origins. Nature there is sublime and strange, a source of fiction for man, as it once was.
In this project, art and science, natural and artificial, come together to build a fiction fueled by different photographic terrains. These lands are both zoos, museums, and natural history museums in France and Belgium, as well as other much more distant territories, such as Laos, China, and Vietnam, where she has been led to travel. Oriane Thomasson’s photographic approach explores the different statuses of the image and the way in which they influence our imagination, as well as our exotic fantasies.
Paradis questions the invention of the concept of nature through its representations, and the myths operating underground in our Western societies that result from it.

All images ©Oriane Thomasson