The white saboteur

The White Saboteur is an immersive, persistent installation in which the viewer becomes, despite themselves, the agent of the disappearance of a fictional glacial world. Fitted with a VR headset, they enter a persistent polar landscape, but their gaze alone is enough to accelerate its erasure. Icebergs and glaciers dissolve as the viewer watches until they leave the universe, leaving behind, for the next visitor, a territory already degraded, doomed to extinction.
As the installation runs, the climate keeps worsening from one visitor to the next and no two spectators ever witness quite the same landscape. In diptych form, a screen renders in real time the fossilised version of this glacial matter erased in VR, now adrift in the void of space, making visible to all the individual impact of each user.
Beyond the metaphor of last-chance tourism, the work stands as a critique of a deeper, capitalist logic of consumption applied to the world itself, and of technology as a tool both of exploration and of destruction. It questions our choices, virtual or real, and our responsibility towards threatened landscapes, starting with those of the cryosphere.
The project was developed in close collaboration with glaciologists and polar researchers, grounding this fictional world in real climate data and keeping it firmly tied to the physical realities it evokes. Would one still enter a world, knowing that the act of entering it is what destroys it?