Sabrina Ratté - Realia | The symbiotic future in the digital art of Sabrina Ratté at MEET
03/13/2025
Realia brings together four works – Floralia (2021), Inflorescences (2023), Plane of Incidence (2024), and Cyberdelia (2024) – that synthesize Sabrina Ratté’s recent thematic journeys. The common denominator is a disruptive poetics that manages to meet the most urgent contemporary topics with grace and great aesthetic accuracy. The changing environment, the climate crisis, technological waste: all signs of a civilization struggling to come to terms with itself and its compulsion to ignore, hiding in wastelands the waste and problems it has created. Sabrina Ratté goes a step further. She turns the inevitable seduction of dystopian vision into poetry, inspired by the philosophycal work of Donna Haraway. The philosopher systematically remedy the contemporary crisis by proposing the advent of an evolutionary symbiosis in which man and nature coexist in a mutual relationship of unexpected and uncontrollable creation. We no longer speak of the Anthropocene , for we are at the advent of the Symbiocene. An era in which the concept of “monstrous” regains its original meaning: wonder, regeneration, awe and new beauty.
From the macro to the micro, digital memory as a tool for knowledge
Hence comes Floralia, the four-part work that will inhabit MEET’s immersive room. The set is a speculative future, where specimens of now-extinct plant species are preserved and displayed in a virtual archive room. Through montage and visual strategies, the space is transformed under the effect of interferences caused by the memory emanating from the catalogued plants, revealing traces of a past that continues to inhabit the place. Floralia is a simulation of ecosystems created by the fusion of technology and organic matter, where past and future coexist in a perpetual tension in the present. The artist then turns her attention to the ambiguous theme of memory. In a transformed world, how will we remember plants and flowers and experience them aesthetically? In the worlds imagined by the artist, knowledge is a path to intimacy with natural matter. An explosion that marks the path from the macro to the micro, to approach, to observe, to know.
For the first time in Italy after many digital art capitals
Sabrina Ratté’s work has been exhibited at the Laforet Museum in Tokyo, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the PHI Center in Montreal, the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl, and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. He has presented solo exhibitions at Gaîté Lyrique in Paris, Fotografiska in Shanghai, and Arsenal Contemporary Art in Montreal and New York. Notably, his works are part of the collection of the Montreal Contemporary Art Museum.
