Léa Dalissier

'The World today is a fascinating place; we’ve never been better off, but we’ve never been worse off either. Not quite sure of whether the glass is half full or half empty, it’s an unsettling era to live in.

I look at humanity’s scientific and technological achievements in humble awe, marvelling at the poetics of its powerful astuteness and creativity. It’s almost too fast to keep track of it all. From artificial intelligence to virtual reality, robotics, prosthetics and transplants, I saw it all in Science Fiction movies when I was younger from ‘Blade Runner’ to ‘Wall-E’; depictions of an increasingly advanced and intelligent human race. 

And yet we live in an age of evolutionary demise, in which our very genetic coding is programming our species’ downfall. Our glands are affecting our cognitive efficiency, slowly making us dumber and apathetic, potentially letting us down for generations to come. Nature takes its course ignoring our capricious materialist needs, it is as if we had naturally peaked.

I wonder if this genetic turn of events is our nature’s way of attempting to spare our minds, creating a coping mechanism for how eye-widening it is to think that we won’t be around for that much longer. Does this mark the beginning of the end of our evolution? We’ve poisoned our crops, contaminated the air we breathe, overpopulated our host, filled the oceans with so much plastic that it will outnumber the fish that live in it by 2050.

How can we deal with this overwhelming issue?

With technological knowledge and biological discoveries, as well as a growing awareness of a general feeling of doom, comes a loss of mystery and innocence, of inter-connections, an ordinary distancing of the mind from the magic of intuition, spiritualism and ritualistic ways of life.

I present here the idea of intuition as a possible synonym for or fragment of the human nature. Something that lives deep inside of us, that doesn’t depend on our logical intellect. A drive that vibrates with an irrepressible sense of our belonging to and with nature.'

Léa Dalissier, 2018 (extract from dissertation: The Unseen, States of the In-between).