"Naïmé Perrette has a background in animation and video, with certain projects transmuting across various media and forms. In recent works she has been intrigued by the new viewing techniquesvavailable with Google Earth and StreetvView: the way that the camera allows hervto explore and interact with this “frozen” world. For this exhibition, she has made Oversights (2019), translucent vinyls for WIELS’ windows, featuring virtual renderings of one site taken from differing perspectives: above, underneath and inside a tunnel. The artist is interested in zones under transformation, developing at speeds that are hard to follow, document or retrace. This particular site includes a highway leading to another country and the entrance to a former encampment, where people have waited in the hope of reaching a better place to live. Captured at a few years’ interval, these jumbled views represent the distortions that occur between different moments of viewing.
While European politics try to keep marginalized populations away from their borders or city centres in an attempt to make them invisible, tools to virtually browse landscapes are constantly improving. One might wonder if our virtual maps assist in masking a problem, keeping it out of sight and at a distance.
Perrette addresses such questions of “invisibilisation”: Who has the power to make maps? Who frames our view ontothe world? How direct (or obstructed) is our access to these mediated places? The agenda behind these supposedly apolitical digital tools seems invisible too. We therefore tend to experience them more readily as innocuous representations of the real while surfing the web as apparently omniscient viewers. Perrette’s work builds on this paradoxical relationship between advanced cartography and physical remoteness, reminding us that we always need to apply critical filters when examining “neutral” images."

Text by Zoe Gray