Simon Rouby
Pangea

Pangea is a protean and ever-evolving creation that blends cinema, visual arts, and natural sciences. Constructed through three-dimensional scans, photogrammetry digitizations, and captures of geographic spaces, this installation unveils a space without boundaries, highlighting the vulnerability of ecosystems facing the impacts of environmental changes. Simon Rouby skillfully crafts a fictitious universe through a reconstructed map of the supercontinent, transcending ethnographic and geographic considerations. The landscapes revealed in this artwork embody the remnants of a vanished civilization.

It was in 2017, during his residency at the Villa Medici in Rome, Simon Rouby brought the 'Pangea' project to life. Translated literally, 'Pangea' means 'all lands', derived from the Greek words πᾶν (pân), meaning 'all', and γαῖα (gaïa), meaning 'earth'. Originally conceptualized in 1912 by the German meteorologist and astronomer Alfred Wegener, the concept refers to the single continent that once comprised the current six terrestrial continents, believed to have disintegrated around two hundred million years ago.