Tumbling Tumbleweed is a series of video games staging the migration of a tumbleweed, an invasive plant also known as Russian thistle that colonized the American continent during the conquest of the West. Presented as a video game in Quieter than Silence (2023) and/or as a self-generated live simulation in Trade Winds and Westerlies (2021), the project explores the concept of territorial appropriation and reexamines its Hollywood representations.

In the mid-1870s, a plant from the Central Asian steppes was unintentionally introduced into South Dakota via the transport of flax seed from the Russian Empire. As it grows, the tumbleweed becomes a thorny bush that dries out until its roots break. Then, it is carried by the winds and disperses hundreds of thousands of seeds in its choreography. As early as 1885, Russian thistles proliferated west of the Rockies as well as in certain regions of Mexico and Canada. The collective knowledge of the tumbleweed is related to the Hollywood productions that featured these dry bushes in the first western movies. By solving the problem of visual representation of the absence, these tumbleweeds have become a cultural prop of Hollywoodian cinema.

By incarnating a tumbleweed with a controller and/or by watching it wander in the winds that are randomly generated by the software, the audience explores a fictional island designed from the topographical data from locations featured in famous movies about human colonization. In this digital environment, players and spectators discover various ecosystems such as: deserts, rainforests, mountains, glaciers or beaches. These biotopes blend in areas offering a singular view of the landscape’s intricacies recomposed from climatically conflicting environments.

By emphasizing the absence of humans through their movements, tumbling tumbleweeds express the idea of a virgin territory. They implicitly evoke the concept of emptiness often used to legitimize territorial appropriation.

Tumbling Tumbleweed's soundtrack (01. Intro | 02. Desert | 03. Rainforest | 04. Beach | 05. Glacier)

Sandbox is a short film about a digital wander through Monument Valley, a territory located at the border of Utah and Arizona. Produced using Google Earth software, it examines the political and cultural dynamics that developed in the region in the 20th century, exploring their effects on the landscape and local communities.

Monument Valley is under the administration of the Diné Nation, a people native to the southwestern United States and whose members are often referred to as Navajos. For them, the valley is a sacred place contributing to the founding myths of their beliefs. The imagery of Monument Valley was popularized as early as 1925, when Hollywood production companies came to the area to make westerns - i.e. movies that portray legends about the conquest of the West. Within the Navajo nation, a significant number of former mines were in activity in the middle of the 20th century. They were secretly used to extract ores containing vanadium and uranium, critical materials to develop nuclear weapons. Navajo miners were uninformed of the dangers associated with being exposed to radioactive ores, and years later, thousands of them and their families would suffer from cancer.

Sandbox follows the journey of ancestral figures from Navajo mythology, forced to flee their village and to roam in a vast no-man's-land in search of a gateway to new worlds. The movie blends narrative and visual fragments borrowed from the original Navajo story as well as from the mining and filmmaking histories of Monument Valley. For example, the images are exact copies of iconic westerns shot in the region, whose locations have been precisely pinpointed and whose framing or camera movements have been recreated using Google Earth.

By combining various political and cultural concerns, Sandbox connects the exterminations of the natives during the conquest of the West and their representations in mainstream media with a more silent genocide led for the development of American atomic weapons.

Reunion and Kidnapping by the River

Tanguy Benoit is a French artist, born in 1997. He lives and works in the Geneva area. Since he graduated from the Geneva University of Art and Design [HEAD], he is particularly concerned by political aspects attributed to the landscape in mainstream media, and he examines the impact of such media on the exploitation of the land and its local communities. He participated in various events organized or supported by cultural institutions such as Villa du Parc (FRA), imagespassages (FRA), Rawart Gallery (ISR) and HEAD - Geneva (CHE).
Although he considers his practice to be an arts-oriented one, Tanguy Benoit’s reflections infiltrate other disciplines such as cinema, video games and design (in particular space design). Through this transdisciplinary approach, he conceives installations made up of dioramas, optical and/or sound instruments, digital simulations and videos. By combining these productions, he develops narratives revealing the ambiguities of the mechanisms used to spread the conventional history.
Besides producing cultural objects, Tanguy Benoit is committed to sharing his knowledge with his peers. Since 2021, he has been involved in the Space and Communication master’s program at the HEAD - Geneva.

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