Flora Bouteille
Artist and director Flora Bouteille, founder of the company Angels’ Front, develops a practice situated between performance, political research, and technological arts, exploring the connections between collective psychologies, defense strategies, and new immersive narratives.
During her residency at Providenza, she continued developing DIE & RETRY, an artistic investigation into cognitive warfare and forms of resistance to ideological manipulation. Drawing on forum theatre and immersive role-playing, she designed an experimental interface where each participant interacts with their own deepfake double. This phase allowed her, together with composer Victor Villafagne, to lay the conceptual and technical groundwork for a large-scale simulation and live performance planned for 2025–2026, in connection with her upcoming residency at the Fiminco Foundation.
"The residency in Providenza was a truly unique moment for me, unlike any other experience I’ve had in art contexts rooted in nature. I had never been so fully immersed in the wild; listening to insects and animals through the night, waking with the sun in my cabin that seemed to disappear into the surrounding bushes.
I started my days with a walk to the natural pool, jumped in the delicious bite of cold water and followed it by a short meditation on the sun. These moments were truly special, and as I took this opportunity to train my ability to go over 10 min of full focus on my breathing I started to feel uncanny feelings, some I would have approached previously only in modified states of consciousness. One morning, after jumping in the water, I went into meditation and started to feel odd; softly I opened my eyes and in the dense scenery of trees and bushes that surrounded the pool I saw butterflies, slowly elevating at the level of my eye sight. In this moment, between awareness and trance, I was struck by the obvious; my existence was no more and no less important than that of those flying beings. As genuine as it may sound, the deep sensation of oneness and fading of the ego is rare. For that instant, and for all the friends I made during my stay, I feel ever grateful."
