2025–ongoing,

Single-channel 4K video installation (7′08″)

Digital Safari: Fables of the Jungle stages six young performers as animal–human hybrids moving through a digitally saturated rainforest. Three men embody Wolf, Tiger, and Vulture; three women embody Black Jaguar, Pallas’s Cat, and Hyena. Their couture-like costumes and ritual masks place them between ceremony and spectacle, tenderness and menace. Here the mask does not conceal but intensifies: fragile bodies assume authority, performing aggression and charisma through disguise.

The work draws on a long history of allegory and performance. These hybrids echo the composite beings of antiquity and the carnivalesque inversions of the baroque. Their frontal gazes and sculptural stillness recall Bronzino’s allegories and Caravaggio’s charged portraits, while the sumptuous textiles and ceremonial bearing suggest Rubens’s mythological courts. The jungle itself—more emblem than ecosystem—resonates with Rousseau’s dreamscapes and the staged ferocity of Delacroix’s hunts, where nature is already theater.

Sound anchors the piece: Mozart’s Lacrimosa from the Requiem, reimagined by Vladimir Rannev in the fragile register of a mechanical music box. The sublime lament becomes uncanny repetition, sacred mourning translated into automated ritual—an updated vanitas in which beauty and luxury are shadowed by loss.

In this fable, the rainforest is both stage and allegory. The six hybrids appear as avatars of a hybrid age—human and animal, predator and child, mask and face—confronting us with the paradoxes of the present: ecological anxiety, digital spectacle, and the thin line between innocence and aggression. Dazzling and dangerous, untouchable yet familiar, they enact a requiem masquerade in the digital jungle.