Robert ParkeHarrison – Sylvain Campeau, Écophilie

[Winter 1999-2000]

This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Summary
Paradoxical: This is how Sylvain Campeau defines the works of Robert ParkeHarrison. It is a paradox of a Resurrection that cannot help but take part in the Apocalypse; the paradox of the uncontrollable destruction of our nourishing Earth, enslaved by the gradual yet inexorable advent of industrial development but counterbalanced by an effect of regeneration of all life, whatever will happen to it; images of deforested, impoverished, arid land, symbolizing the march of death, which introduce, in spite of everything, a form of life through animated machinery, like the androids of our famous predecessors (among them the future “Eves” of Villiers de l’Isle-Adams and Fritz Lang’s in Metropolis). We do not emerge unscathed from these images. Only an indestructible faith in life enables us to pass through the emotional states – mourning, melancholy, utopia – provoked by ParkeHarrison’s “machine-humans” or “human-machines”.