Each imagined floating city draws inspiration from concrete initiatives designed to address environmental challenges, stemming from a variety of cultural and geographical contexts. Floating Cities gives shape and voice to these alternatives through an immersive aesthetic, where augmented reality and sound poetry interact, weaving connections between them to better convey, awaken, and connect.
Here, there is nothing abstract or theoretical: the work is rooted in the territories traversed, in the gestures observed, in the stories collected during residencies in Taiwan, India, Tunisia, Morocco, Brazil, the United States, and France. Each painting thus becomes a fragment of the world, inhabited by voices, memories, and solutions rooted in lived experience.
It is an art of connection that unfolds: a connection between ancient knowledge, through embroidery, and contemporary technologies; between scientific data and poetic narration; between the political and the sensitive. Thanks to the Under The Starry Vault mobile app, viewers are invited to animate the images and listen to sound haikus and audio diaries. They are no longer mere visitors, but storytellers, activating a living memory where the voices of the world resonate.
Beyond the interactive device, there is also a subtle reflection on time that runs throughout the work. The almost instantaneous nature of digital technology contrasts with the slow pace of embroidery. Created in collaboration with embroidery collectives in Brazil (Bumba Meu Boi da Floresta de Mestre Apolônio, São Luís) and India (Kalhath Institute, Lucknow), these embroideries give shape to the invisible, to currents, corals, and creatures of the deep.
By choosing to combine technology and craftsmanship, speed and slowness, Floating Cities creates a space for listening and contemplation, where re-enchantment with the world becomes possible—not as a return to the past, but as a movement toward a livable future, shaped by imagination and a commitment to life.
To traverse The Universal Forest is to accept slowing down, to enter into the long cycle of time and regeneration—a time at odds with the ecological urgency of the present day.
Far from being a simple visual effect, augmented reality animation of endangered animals is akin to symbolic reanimation: giving body, breath, and voice back to those we no longer hear, no longer see—or no longer want to see. Each apparition emerging from the forest is an encounter. The animal is not just a naturalistic motif: it is a subject. It makes an appeal. Through sound haiku, it recounts its uniqueness and fragility. The augmented reality fresco becomes a space of resonance, a theater of apparitions. The Universal Forest does not show, it invokes. It invites us to rethink our relationship with living things through listening and emotion, confronts us with the beauty of a world that is fading away, and encourages us to become, in turn, its attentive witnesses.
At the end of the tour, educational and artistic content extends the experience, opening up a space for knowledge and transmission.
In line with our committed artistic approach, part of the profits from the distribution of this work are donated to our association Socotra Dragon Blood Tree, which is actively working to protect the Socotra dragon tree and its ecosystem.
This project was carried out in collaboration with the Kalhath Institute, with the support of the Jan Michalski Foundation.
The baobab tree, a guardian figure in many cosmologies, becomes a threshold here: a passage between the imaginary and the real, between childhood and memory, between matter and appearance.
Through this baobab tree, a guardian figure in many cosmologies, the aim is not only to offer a spectacular visual display. It is to bring forth a presence through paper, sound, and augmented images. To give substance back to what, in our contemporary world, tends to disappear: the sensitive connection to living things, slowness, listening, the capacity for wonder.
As in our projects La Forêt universelle (The Universal Forest) and Villes flottantes (Floating Cities), augmented reality is not a technological effect, but a form of symbolic reanimation. It allows the still image to come to life and become a meeting place. The pop-up becomes a theater of apparitions, where animals, voices, and tales emerge.
Baobab is also a reflection on time. The immediacy of digital technology contrasts with the long time required for artistic creation, cutting, illustration, and manual production. This work celebrates the fruitful friction between craftsmanship and innovation, between slowness and suddenness, between the tradition of books and contemporary immersive forms.
