Opening exhibition : Pangea by Simon Rouby – from 23/04/2022 to 23/07/2022

Born in 1980, Simon Rouby studied painting and sculpture before moving onto other media. He studied animated filmmaking, first in Les Gobelins, Paris, then in CalArts, Los Angeles. His films were shown in many international festivals such as Cannes, London, Tokyo, and São Polo. In 2015, he finalized Adama, his first feature film, which was nominated at the Césars and European Film Awards as one of the best animated films of the year. Winner of the Atelier des Ailleurs (a residence initiated by the Ministry of Culture – Department of Cultural Affairs of Reunion and the French Southern and Antarctic Lands), he spent several months in the Kerguelen Islands, then in Nigeria where he captured images of landscapes that would serve as raw material for the production of his works. 

The project Pangea was born in 2017, while he was a resident of the Villa Medici in Rome. “Pangea” litteraly means “all the lands” (the term comes from the Greek πᾶν (pân), “all, whole” and γαῖα (gaïa), “land”). The concept of Pangea was hypothesized in 1912 by the German meteorologist and geologist Alfred Wegener, who postulated that before breaking up and drifting to their present locations, all the continents had formed a single supercontinent.

Pangea is an evolving work at the crossroads of cinema, plastic arts and natural sciences. Made up of three-dimensional scans, digitization by photogrammetry and captures of geographical spaces, the installation reveals a space without borders that bears witness to the fragility of our ecosystem. Through a reconstructed map of the supercontinent, Simon Rouby manages to develop a fictional universe, freed from ethnographic and geographical issues, where the landscapes thus revealed symbolize the remains of a forgotten civilization.