Info
About the artist:
Born in 1991, Thomas Garnier is a French visual artist and architect whose practice explores the lifespan of the built environment through the lens of digital automation. A graduate of the ENSAPVS and Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains, he was awarded the ADAGP “Digital Arts Discovery” prize for his installation Cenotaph.
Garnier utilizes state-of-the-art production – including advanced robotics, 3D printing, and environmental engineering – to revive pre-cinematic traditions such as phantasmagoria and Pepper’s Ghost. His work functions as a “technical hauntology,” where the precision of contemporary machines is used to reanimate the ghosts of architectural history. From automated concrete models that perpetually build and unbuild themselves to robotic shadow-plays of “dark factories,” his installations create a dialogue between the weight of industrial remains and the ephemeral nature of the digital loop.
By merging 18th-century romantic imagery with AI-generated landscapes of servers and logistics hubs, Garnier documents a world caught between construction and decay. His practice reveals an archaeology of the present: an unstable, illusory space where the distinction between the archaic and the futuristic begins to dissolve.
About his project Cenotaph v2.0 & Companion Cartographies:
This residency will continue and expand Cenotaph, first exhibited in Wrocław at Entropia Gallery during the WRO Biennale 2019. It is an ongoing installation that operates as a speculative architecture situated between construction and collapse, presence and absence, system and ruin. The project revisits and reactivates the original installation as a living structure: not a fixed artwork, but a continuously maintained and reconfigured apparatus.
At WRO Art Center, the work will be reworked as Cenotaph v2.0, extending its mechanical and spatial logic while introducing new layers of material and conceptual instability. The installation will remain an automated system generating a fragile urban landscape – an architecture without stable function, caught in cycles of emergence and disappearance.
Alongside this reactivation, the residency will develop a series of companion pieces that expand the research into a global condition of unfinished or abandoned modernity. These works will take the form of visual and spatial cartographies of “ghost cities,” incomplete megastructures, and halted construction sites across different geographies. These sites – often suspended between ambition and obsolescence – will be approached not as failures, but as latent architectures: spaces where political, economic, and ecological narratives remain materially visible.
Through field research, archival investigation, and speculative mapping, the project will construct a fragmented atlas of these architectures in suspension. This atlas will function both as documentation and fiction, tracing the invisible networks that link sites of abandonment, extraction, and hyper-construction.
Ultimately, Cenotaph v2.0 and its companion works propose an archaeology of the contemporary built environment – where ruins are not the end of architecture, but one of its operational states.