arcadia, FL
Project details
- Year
- 2023
- Programme
- Bachelor – Photography
- Practices
- Honours Programme
- Minor
- Visual Culture
eli hooper, b. 2000
arcadia, FL, 2023
nine e-paper displays on steel frames
54 x 50cm
for my family and friends, thank you for supporting me throughout this period.
Finding the red thread in one’s personal life throughout the chaos of the world is, to put it simply, a difficult task;
In a system that is so sporadic and surreal, ever shifting at the hands of political, societal, and personal change, it seems like any remaining strand of coherency is, in effect, “lost to the void.” Yet, the necessity to find and follow this thread has occurred more and more often throughout my life and practice, and arcadia, FL is my own attempt to tune in and harness the hidden frequencies of order.
Ever since the establishment of my practice, I’ve found that all my work leads back to the concept of world building, the creation of a sanctuary to safely explore one’s own emotions, and the closest representation of this sanctuary I’ve found in the English language is Arcadia, a literary device that has been used for centuries. Arcadia is a synecdoche dating back to antiquity; a utopia of harmony, wonder, and desire that Virgil first alluded to in The Eclogues became the forerunner for sublime experience in the peak of romantic poetry. Yet, the term has become reappropriated once again within the context of our own world, one dominated by the hegemony of our economic system, and Arcadia, FL, a small town in Florida, has become the moniker for my world due to its representation of not only the utopia that I so dearly strive for, but also the harsh reality of living in a collective trauma.
arcadia, FL is a work composed of three frames housing nine separate e-paper displays whose only goal is to lay claim to the mechanisms inside of not only my head, but depict a realm I had previously not considered as external from myself. I have been creating work for the past four years that flirts with the idea of a coherent world that is separate from our own, but I’ve never explored or questioned the fabric of the world itself. arcadia, FL is an attempt to represent the most personal corner of my practice, presenting it to others in a way that is approachable and relevant. The choice of e-paper displays as a medium with a cinematic approach to its narrative is, I feel, representative of the cross-pollination of different information at the hands of the internet, and the subject matter of the work, a kind of film whose mechanics are reminiscent of Chris Marker’s La Jetée, aim to show not only the harsh reality of our society, but the beauty and love of the worlds we create for ourselves.
Whilst nostalgia, grief, creation, and visual culture have been the most accessible gateways to this world at this point, arcadia, FL’s primary mode of operation is love. The appreciation one can have for themselves and the capacity to take refuge from the world around them, is, at the end of the day, the very baseline for all of these gateways, and although I will use each one to its fullest extent at a later date, it is first necessary to outline arcadia, FL’s existence in the first place, which is the very motivation behind this project. arcadia, FL is therefore a work about finding love within yourself, creating a world within your head, and sharing that for the outside world.
Artist Statement
Eli Hooper (b. 2000) is a New Zealand born, Rotterdam based maker currently exploring the cross-pollination between media, mass popular culture, and the digitisation of nostalgia. Working primarily in photography, Eli’s practice is largely founded on image-based research, using both practical and non-conventional printing and display methods to challenge the way we consider the image pool.
This project was made possible with the help of Fonds Kwadraat.