Tim Rod’s project Urgent Paradise is a visual research on the symbolic and cultural meaning of the palm tree in the Western collective imagination, in particular around tourism and escapism, made in collaboration with computational biologist Lucien Hinderling. For this project as well, Tim Rod combines different types of images, from analogue black and white photographs and street views taken during his own trips, to digitally manipulated and AI-generated images.
The generated images, where trunkless palm trees are often seen floating in the sky or hovering over cityscapes, offer a dreamy but incisive metaphor of how the palm tree has become a ubiquitous symbol of the tropics and a promise of leisurely existence. In our imagination, it is indeed no longer tethered to the often harsher realities of the territories it grows in. In exhibitions, Urgent Paradise, is often staged as site-specific installations where the simplest elements (red and yellow light, the outline of a trunkless palm tree) are used to bathe the visitors in an artificial tropical sunset.
