© Chloé Azzopardi
Chloé Azzopardi is a visual artist and photographer who dissolves the line between human presence and the living world. Through finely tuned images, she reveals the subtle negotiations between bodies, materials and landscape, inviting viewers to rethink how we sense and inhabit our surroundings. With a signature blend of poetic subtlety and conceptual clarity, Azzopardi creates images that offer a lucid, quietly radical way of interpreting our entanglement with Mother Nature, producing work that is deeply attuned to the ecological moment.
Contemporary cultural imagination has shifted from bright technological optimism to a future cast in the shadows of scarcity and ecological instability. Images of planetary depletion now dominate visual culture, reflecting a growing awareness that the infrastructures sustaining modern life rely on materials and ecosystems stretched to their limits.
Within this context, Chloé Milos Azzopardi's Non Technological Devices offers a strikingly different lens through which to consider what lies ahead. Rather than extending the narrative of collapse, her work turns toward the possibility of reconfiguring our relationship to the environments we inhabit. The exhibition interweaves photography, sculptural construction and performative gesture, generating a world where bodily presence and natural matter become inseparable.
© Chloé Azzopardi
At the core of the series are objects crafted from materials gathered directly from the land: fragments of wood, shells, ice, and other elements that defy permanence. These structures echo technological devices only enough to unsettle our habitual expectations of what tools should look like. They are neither replicas nor critiques in a literal sense; instead, they operate as propositions; suggestive forms that explore how the body might adapt when the logic of industrial production no longer holds.
The devices hover between artefact and organism. Some appear to brace or shield the wearer, others to heighten sensory perception, and many refuse any clear functional explanation altogether. This ambiguity is deliberate. By withholding utility, Azzopardi shifts attention from what the objects do to how they reorganise perception. In her photographs, the interactions between bodies and these fragile constructions register as experiments in attunement: touch becomes investigative, sight becomes relational, and the environment becomes an active collaborator rather than a backdrop.
This reorientation is grounded in a broader provocation: what alternative futures might emerge if we relinquish the fantasy that technological progression must take the form of increasing artificiality? Azzopardi's work suggests that reimagining augmentation through ecological attentiveness, rather than extraction, opens up other pathways forward. The materials themselves carry this argument; their origin in the landscape binds the objects to the conditions they implicitly address.
The devices are seen as provisional tools for a world navigating the consequences of long-standing environmental strain. Azzopardi's devices read as a quiet warning. She doesn't dismiss technological progress, but she insists we reckon with its ecological cost.
This research positions itself at the intersection of ecological thought, technological commentary and posthuman inquiry. Non Technological Devices examines the complex impacts of human intervention on natural systems and seeks to envision new forms of coexistence with the living world. In doing so, it gestures toward the emergence of an iconography of ecological self-defence; an aesthetic framework capable of articulating resistance, resilience and relationality in a time of planetary precarity.
Through their precarious forms and speculative presence, Azzopardi's constructions prompt us to scrutinise the assumptions that underlie our desires for progress and to acknowledge the fragility of the conditions that make any future possible.
