A Holographic Installation by Yann Toma
« This is an out-of-space and out-of-time grotto, a receptacle for shared pulsations, a locus for unconventional and unknown narratives and imaginings. » Yann Toma
In resonance with his thinking about the climate upheavals that are shaking our world to the core, artist Yann Toma explores and reveals the Climate Divining Grotto, The Climate Divining Grottoa dreamspace connected to a real and at the same time fantasized history of the world, which is as much a passing and deluded appeal as it is an all-too-fleeting safe and liberating harbour.
A grotto of aspirations and imaginings, its holographic ornamentation is transfigurative, and shows visitors shapes from another world where art and nature, pleasure and peril, humans and nymphs can thrive and coexist for a while. Designed as a model of the cosmos, the Climate Divining Grotto appears as a locus that embodies both the tensions between artifice and nature, and the coming together of the natural and human worlds. It brings to life a primitive, underground world, the elements of which coalesce into shifting shapes that open a door to the contemplation of the mysteries and origins of life.
En savoir plus…
The Climate Divining Grotto echoes back to the Villa Aldobrandini Grotto, that used to have a number of rusticated niches with statues, each with its individual sounds, pitches and water features. Here too we have a fountain that produces “water vortices, with thunder”, whereas in other chambers, Polyphemus and centaurs play woodwinds. With the Cistercian abbey, its ruins and greenery as a backdrop, the Climate Divining Grotto highlights how precious water is and invites visitors to question their imaginings. It bears witness both to the collective aspirations of our time, with climate change shattering our certainties, and to the individual obsessions of each and every one of our visitors, which this magical grotto transforms systematically into something macroscopic and radically different.
This entrancing piece of contemporary art is also redolent of Romantic aesthetics and sensitivity, concerned as it is by the insignificance of man in the face of grandiose natural phenomena, eliciting feelings of “sublime” awe that in turn inspire artistic creativity. And in this fashion it also connects very directly with the surging Geysir Ouest-Lumière, another piece by Yann Toma, which can be seen in the Abbey’s cloister.
The Climate Divining Grotto may well be one of those places where the complex pathways of some magnetic changes underway in our world come to the fore, mainly within ourselves. Can we truly make them out?
La Grotte des Divinations Climatiques – the Climate Divining Grotto, 2023
In situ holographic divining installation
