Chloe Azzopardi

According to geographer Yi-Fu Tan, the human mind seems predisposed to order phenomena not only into segments, but also into opposing pairs. It shows a definite tendency to distinguish pairs within the segments we perceive in the continuum of nature, and then assign opposite meanings to the components of each pair. This could simply reflect an intimate structure of the human mind that we transfer to the reality around us. Antinomic concepts such as up-down, right-left, here-there stem from the physical reality of our own bodies and serve to order the world from our own perspective. These fundamental oppositions of our human experience take on a symbolic and ontological meaning: life-death, light-darkness, chaos-cosmos, masculine-feminine, nature-civilisation...
Human beings have ceased to see themselves as part of the whole. They view reality from the outside. The very opposition between natural and artificial is misleading: nothing is more artificial—that is, created by humans—than a vegetable garden or a field of crops. And at the same time, nothing is more human than technology.
Science and technology are human creations, and mathematics and physics are not the language of the universe. They are the most objective tools within our intersubjectivity for creating the cosmos and bringing us closer to it.
With the series, Non-Technological Devices, Chloe Milos Azzopardi proposes a universe composed of futuristic objects, tools made from collected natural elements, assembled to imitate the technological devices that populate our daily lives. Between rudimentary productions and science fiction creations, these artefacts are a mirror of our fantasies of the future. The artist initiates a reflection on our imagination: how can we envision an alternative future in the face of our dreams of a hyper-artificialised and technologised world? With the help of fiction and play, Azzopardi seeks other ways of imagining augmented lives, creating organic cyborgs whose aim would be to inscribe the body in a different way in the environment. He uses the displacement and poetic diversion of symbolic artefacts of technical progress to question our relationship with living things and with the disappearance of the Earth's “resources” used to build the components of our technological objects.