Heterotopia

The term heterotopia was introduced by the French philosopher Michel Foucault for ‘spaces of otherness’, spaces where multiple, mutually exclusive meanings actually overlap each other. Like in the gardens that Karine Laval photographed in the United States and Europe for HETEROTOPIA, which are both natural and artificial. A garden is a microcosm in which plants and animals are placed that normally wouldn’t even coexist in the outside world. This cosmos functions for Laval as an open-air studio and as a subject. Her images transform reality with distortions, enlargements and bright colours. They are not the result of digital manipulation, but were created using a camera and reflective surfaces. The seemingly seductive images carry a message about a world in change; dealing simultaneously with the experience of a psychedelic view on nature and a toxic, post-natural world.