If life is a video game, the graphics are great, but the plot is confusing & the tutorial is way too long.

Cedric Zellweger’s project centres around Elon Musk’s life — his career, family and global influence — viewed through a critical lens. Musk perceives the world as an immense playground, where his ambiguous ties to Donald Trump further complicate global ev

This project explores Elon Musk as a symbolic figure within a culture shaped by visibility, consumption, technological acceleration, and constant media circulation. Rather than approaching him only as an individual, the work considers Musk as an image: a constructed and unstable figure formed through innovation, speculation, public attention, and political ambiguity.

Within the framework of ARCHIPELAGO, Musk becomes a kind of cultural island: hyper-visible, self-contained, yet deeply connected to wider systems of power, fantasy, capital, technology, and media. His career, family narratives, global influence, and ambiguous proximity to Donald Trump reflect a fragmented cultural landscape in which public identities circulate like isolated territories, constantly negotiated through screens, platforms, and spectacle.

The project takes the form of a media installation combining 4×5 film photography, digital elements, and interactive components. The photographic works stage exaggerated, sometimes satirical scenes that blur the line between fiction and reality. They combine real facts, existing media narratives, and imagined or intensified scenarios. Some elements are rooted in events that have already taken place, while others appear fictional at the moment of their creation. These images exist in a space between anticipation and coincidence, where invented scenes can later begin to resemble real events. Rather than claiming prediction, the work examines how fact, speculation, coincidence, and visual culture shape one another.

Inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, the project dissolves clear moral oppositions. Heaven and hell collapse into a single seductive and chaotic spectacle. In this sense, Musk’s world appears as an archipelago of contradictions: utopian promises and dystopian consequences, freedom and control, technological progress and nostalgic myth, private fantasy and collective impact.

Texas functions as a symbolic landscape within the work, embodying the contradictions of the “American way of life”: expansive yet controlled, driven by ambition yet shaped by nostalgia. It becomes one island within a larger imaginary geography, where borders between politics, technology, entertainment, and belief are increasingly unstable.

By staging Musk as both protagonist and symptom, the project questions the cultural islands of our time: spaces where power, identity, ideology, and media spectacle become isolated yet interconnected. It asks how dialogue remains possible within a fragmented visual culture, and how images might reveal the tensions, desires, and crises that define contemporary coexistence.

Note: Images 05–07 are retouched final scans of the negatives. The other four images are preview scans and remain unretouched. Additional images for the project will be produced in summer 2026.