Audio Transcript [EN]
“You long for trees in the desert. Not just for the shade they provide but also because they stretch up toward space. When the ground is flat, the sky sinks. Trees raise the sky by being so tall and yet having so much further to go. Trees create room.“
The sound installation Where is that Paradise? explores the concept of paradise as a link between the imaginary, the idealised and the material.
The word Paradise is derived from the Old Persian word pairi-daêza, which means royal or noble enclosure.
What is the relationship between the idea of paradise as afterlife and the garden as a human attempt to realise a paradise on earth? Who has the privilege of conceiving and living this paradise?
Why is the idea of peace – fundamental to most concepts of paradise – so deeply linked to a nostalgia, a longing for distance or an exoticist, othering notion of the far away, the other?
Paradise is constructed as a negative space; like the horizon, it exists in the imagination but escapes the touch. As Tété-Michel Kpomassie, the first known African to reach Greenland in 1956 – which he personally conceived of as a paradise – asked in an interview: “Where is that paradise?”