Thomas Pendeliau

Film

In the depths of a transformed Earth lies an ark dedicated to preserving the world's memory, an ultimate repository where the biological traces of life merge with the digital records of knowledge. Its preservation is entrusted to autonomous machines that watch over the rebirth of plants and the emergence of children conceived outside the body.

But from this static memory, a mutation is taking place: more than a mere archive, the site becomes the incubator of an unprecedented symbiosis—a post-human cohabitation free from hierarchies, where the organic and the digital forge a new way of worlding.

This harmony, however, comes at a price: a newfound dependency on the very technology that orchestrates it. Is this controlled utopia a cradle or a tomb? And what becomes of kinship and memory when they are no longer passed down, but calculated?

The very form of the film embodies this hybridization. Driven by a chimerical image where live-action footage and AI-generated visions fuse into a continuous flow, the film becomes a speculative reverie, an immersion into a beauty that is at once gentle and unsettling.

Thomas Pendeliau

I am a French artist-researcher, born in 1989, working between Lille and Arles. After studying art history and archaeology, I enrolled at the École nationale supérieure de la photographie (ENSP) in Arles, graduating in 2022. During my studies in Arles, I gradually moved away from photography as an end in itself, considering the image as data to be manipulated using contemporary digital techniques. In 2022–2023, I was involved in the images IN residency, supported by the French Ministry of Culture, in collaboration with Le BAL, Jeu de Paume, Rencontres d’Arles, Académie d’Aix-Marseille, INSEAC and ENSP. In 2024, I joined the Martha Graham cohort at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains. That same year, I won a prize the Rencontres internationales de la jeune photographie festival in Niort, and went on to do a research-creation residency at the École centrale in Casablanca. In September 2026 I will start a PhD thesis in research and creation at the Centre d’études des arts contemporains, a laboratory attached to the University of Lille with Le Fresnoy – Studio national.

Production

Credits