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?

The artists share an ongoing fascination with how reality is slowly overtaken by simulation and with time itself stretched into geological slowness. For the artists this reflection nestles more precisely in the disappearance of the cryosphere and the upheavals it imposes on our ways of inhabiting the world. The White Saboteur grows from this shared ground: a persistent world entered in solitude, whose disappearance is not staged but triggered by the visitor’s own presence, who thus becomes the active witness of their own erasure.

PRODUCTION 1:
RISETTE - Pierre-Arthur Goulet
76 Rue Murillo
92170 Vanves, France
Tel: +33 660763589
E-mail: contact@risette.world
Web: http://www.risette.world
Social Media: @risette2021 - Instagram

PRODUCTION 2:
ACTRIO STUDIO - Michael Geidel
Kochstrasse 132
04277 Leipzig, Germany
Tel: +49 1795054665
E-mail: mg@actrio-studio.de
Web: http://actrio-studio.de/
Social Media: @actriostudio – Instagram, @actriostudio.bsky.social - Bluesky

PRODUCTION 3:
N°130 - Hugo Arcier
72 rue Condorcet
93100 Montreuil, France
Tel: +33 684126974
E-mail: hugoarcier@no130.io
Web: http://no130.io/studio/

PRODUCTION 4:
ZERO DE CONDUITE - Fabienne Giezendanner
13, rue Charles Quint
59100 Roubaix, France
Tel: +33 663327021
E-mail: fabienne@zdcprod.fr
Web: http://zdcprod.fr/

PRESS OFFICE:
Anne McKinnon – RISTBAND
Tel: +33 789 55 77 76
E-mail: anne@ristband.co