(Un)playing the Worlds
Agnès de Cayeux FR
SILA
Interactive installation
October 30 through January 17, 2027
Wednesday through Saturday 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Salt Storehouse
Avignon
Legal Notices
“Sila” is presented in co-production with CHRONIQUES.
The exhibition (Dé)Jouer les mondes is produced by Le Grenier à sel.
Curated by: Isabelle Arvers and Véronique Baton, with assistance from Zoé Neyreneuf
SILA is a poetic, immersive work that blends documentary and fiction: a Greenlandic experience that offers a counterpoint to the masculine, heroic imagery of polar expeditions.
Agnès de Cayeux and her collaborators invite us to journey through real and virtual polar worlds, following in the footsteps of women artists, scientists, and activists who have explored this exceptional Arctic region from the 19th century to the present day.
In Kalaallisut, Greenland’s official language , the word “sila” refers to natural elements such as wind, air, or weather, but also to a life force that governs the universe.
Credits
A CHRONIQUES CRÉATIONS platform project.
Written and directed by Agnès de Cayeux, starring Mélanie Courtinat, Laura Mannelli, Aude Guivarc’h, and Maëlla Mickaëlle.
A production by: DARK EUPHORIA – POULPE BLEU PRODUCTION – JAXA PRODUCTION INC.
In co-production with Le Grenier à Sel, Le Safran – Scène conventionnée, Artzoyd Studios, SIANA, and the University of Evry Paris-Saclay.
With support from the National Center for Cinema and the Moving Image (CNC), the SODEC FilmFund Luxembourg Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Region, in partnership with CNC Pictanovo, as part of the New Media Fund with support from the Haut-de-France region, and in partnership with CNC Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole
As part of the exhibition (Un)playing the Worlds of the Salt Granary
This group exhibition is dedicated to artists who use video games as a space for critical experimentation and poetic subversion. Through a series of interactive installations, independent games, sculptures made from discarded electronic devices, and transmedia narratives, the exhibition questions the rules, interfaces, and virtual spaces to reveal what they say about some of our contemporary representations, such as power relations, digital extractivism, colonial narratives, and alternative imaginaries.
Agnès de Cayeux
Agnès de Cayeux sometimes compulsively observes our online world. Just like the rest of us. From the Virginia Tech massacre to the Cyborgiennes, she crafts texts from afar: In my room, literary rooms produced by Arte and superimposed onto fragments of women’s bodies filmed by the women themselves— Alissa, a programmed AI creature, a literary figure developed for the Jeu de Paume— The Case of the Hippocampus, an immersive and literary work created for the Venice Music Biennale. D Since 2010, Agnès de Cayeux has been exploring in situ Arctic issues: archival matters, family legacies linked to the French polar expeditions of the 1950s, and eco-technological, postcolonial, and feminist issues. She was in residence in Greenland in 2011 as part of a Villa Médicis Hors les Murs program, and was subsequently supported by the CNAP in 2015. Her Arctic installations have been featured at the Centre Pompidou (2017), the Centre d’art La Panacée in Montpellier (2015), and most recently at the SIANA Biennale in Paris-Saclay (2025). Together with performer Maëlla Mickaëlle, they traveled along the west coast of Greenland in 2023, filming the dancer’s movements—from the immutable icebergs of the Ilulissat Fjord to the futuristic forms of the Nuuk data center.