Biography

Chloé Azzopardi is a visual artist and photographer whose long-term projects combine photography, performance, and installation. Situated at the intersection of experimental and documentary photography, her images create fictional worlds marked by heightened strangeness and sensoriality. Her research focuses on ecology, new technologies, and the construction of post-Capitalocene imaginaries. Her practice unfolds through a poetic and activist vision that invites us to imagine new possibilities.

Research Project at Fondation Martell

At Fondation Martell, Chloé Azzopardi continued her project on “non-technological devices,” a speculative fiction that explores our relationship with the living world. She creates hybrid objects from natural elements gathered in and around the Cognac region and assembles them so that they resemble real or imagined technological devices. These artefacts, poised between rudimentary craftsmanship and science fiction, form a speculative universe that questions our fantasies of technological progress and proposes alternative ways of imagining the future.

Through these “organic cyborgs,” the artist examines our relationship to living systems, extractivism, and earthly resources, opening up new avenues for imagining an iconography of “ecological self-defence.” How can we make an alternative future visible in the face of dreams of a hyper-artificial world driven by the relentless pursuit of technological advancement? Through this project, she seeks to generate images that can serve as resources for our collective imagination.

Residency Outcomes

During her residency, Chloé Azzopardi used fiction and play as tools to imagine alternative forms of enhanced life, creating “organic cyborgs” designed to reconfigure the body’s relationship to its environment. As in her previous work, she employs poetic displacement and détournement of artefacts that symbolize technological progress—such as headphones, filtering goggles, and exoskeletons—to question our relationship with the living world.

She introduced beeswax as a new material into her palette of natural resources, shaping it into unusual colours and forms. By doing so, she connects this uniquely malleable material to questions of the exploitation of living systems, extractivism, and the depletion of the earthly resources used to manufacture the components of our technological devices.

Connection to the Almanach Lab

Chloé Azzopardi’s work opens a new chapter in the Almanach Lab’s productions by introducing poetry as a medium for disseminating research. This immersive engagement with living matter offers renewed perspectives on how to create sensitive narratives about bodies embedded within their environments. Materials are preserved as much as possible in their natural state and presented through light, fragile assemblages. The artist’s intervention in the landscape remains discreet and ephemeral, leaving only a subtle trace.

Resources Mobilised

• Renewable resources from the forests and fields of the Charente region.