The Anthropocene Illusion

While we destroy the natural world around us, we have become masters of a stage-managed, artificial ‘experience’ of nature - a reassuring spectacle, an illusion.

Note from PhMuseum Editorial Team: this submission is temporarly presented in its reduced version to allow the artist publish the work in exclusivity with an international media.

In a tiny fraction of our Earth’s history, we humans have altered our world beyond anything it has experienced in tens of millions of years. Scientists are calling it a new epoch, The Anthropocene - the age of human.

Future geologists will find evidence in the rock strata of an unprecedented human impact on our planet - huge concentrations of plastics, fallout from the burning of fossil fuels, and vast deposits of concrete used to build our cities. The number of wild animals on Earth has halved in the past 40 years. We are forcing animals and plants to extinction by removing their habitats.

We have broken our ancient bonds with nature, divorcing ourselves from the land we once roamed and from other animals. Yet we cannot face the true scale of our loss. Somewhere deep within us the desire for contact with nature remains. So, while we devastate the natural world around us, we have become masters of a stage-managed, artificial ‘experience’ of nature, a reassuring spectacle, an illusion.

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This work reflects on how, at a time of increasing environmental crisis, we retreat into a consoling, illusory version of ‘Nature’.

Over six years, across four continents, I have examined how we humans immerse ourselves in increasingly choreographed and simulated environments to mask our destructive impact on the natural world. From zoos, theme parks and natural history museums, to national parks, African safaris and alpine resorts, this work reveals not only a global phenomenon of denial and collective self-delusion, but also a desperate craving for a connection to a world we have turned our back on.