Thomas Pellerey Grogan

Piqûre-Lunaire (english: Lunar-Sting)

Installation with 360° stereoscopic video (12'25")

“Lunar-Sting”, La Becque, La Tour-de-Peilz (CH), 2019; “Open-Studios”, Space, London (UK), 2019

Dimensions: h.200 x w.450 x d.300 cm

Materials: cherry wood, polyethylene, nylon, VR headsets

A 360° pastoral video essay set on the border of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The video depicts the particularity of the region’s landscape with its three suns (the lake, the stone walls, and the sun) as an important element in the production of local food products but also as a key factor in these products’ branding and storytelling. The video, conceived in a near future, witnesses the transitioning from an industrial agricultural practice to an esoteric one, ‘more open to the cosmos’. It sees in the use of streaming technologies, such as virtual reality, a potential to promote remote and new agricultural spaces and practices, as well as a method of self-understanding landscape and its histories.

Conceived during a residency at La Becque in Switzerland, the speculative fiction incorporates research on the Lavaux region in order to project a possible future for the wine and other agricultural industries in that setting, incorporating geological, cosmological, and literary elements of the same space. VR processes, now commonplace in hospitality and tourism sectors, aim to facilitate remote immersion within a distant site or time. This work explores the potential of these virtual processes to emphasise, in an agricultural context, the connection between agricultural products and the topography of their place of origin, from an environmental and economic point of view. It reflects on the role of emerging technology and winemaking techniques in repositioning the human species within a threatened ecosystem, bridging the virtual and physical.