Reaching for Dawn

What to do when you reach the end of the world? In the middle of the Bering Strait lies the island of Little Diomede, an isthmus like a melting pot of icy, wild, mythological dreams and a source of burning desires, whose apparent silence eclipses the very real rumbling of the issues surrounding it. The arrival in this muffled setting is in itself a test of strength where it is impossible to escape the vertigo of our own fragility. The profile of an isolated fisherman invites us to explore, beyond the surface, the intertwining of narrative layers of which this place seems to be the sole repository.
The cradle of ancestral migratory routes, this ‘gateway to humanity’ and those who inhabit it are the descendants of an ancient collective memory that makes us lose our most intimate certainties, giving way to a form of introspective solitude. Faced with the peaceful immensity of eternal landscapes, we are then driven, by an inexorable power, to return to our origins, which we sense outline the foundations of a possible future. From this land between past and present, reality and imagination, we await an answer. For Elliott Verdier, the visceral desire to venture as far as possible is part of this quest, to the point of confronting the edge of the physical world.
In this, at first glance, untouched wilderness, man has endeavoured to make his presence felt. He has drawn a political border that separates two empires, the United States and Russia. He has also drawn a line of date, so that the day is not the same on either side of this demarcation. Yet, faced with the infinite, with this setting that seems frozen and unchanging, as if imbued with age-old gravity, the reality of time and space disappears to make way for chimeras. Silhouettes emerge from the void, the landforms metamorphose with the storms, the shapes stretch, distend, until they split in two.
For opposite the American Little Diomede is Big Diomede, its Russian big sister, a silent ‘other’ that we cannot ignore because it is so close, but from which we could not be further away because it is so inaccessible. The island haunts the horizon, like the reminiscences of a loved and familiar being. The omnipresence of its imposing contours evokes the mirages of a dreamt-of tomorrow, but forever unattainable.
The images of Tomorrow's Gone touch our limits. Beneath the stillness, the calm and the serenity, we sense the deadly violence of the effects of global warming, armed conflicts, the frantic race of capitalism devouring languages and civilisations to the bone. The snow-covered houses seem to be holding their breath in anticipation of a denouement, whatever it may be. Under these conditions, it is impossible to turn our backs on the mysteries that accompany the search for our own place, on the melancholy of our finitude. Yet confronting it is a necessity, both collective and intimate, the only way to design new beginnings.

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With the support of Centre national des arts plastiques (National Centre for Visual Arts), France.