Pharmakon is an interactive installation situated at the intersection of nature, technology, and ritual. At the center of the work is a handmade book, loosely inspired by historical herbariums, containing nine printed pages, each associated with a video. The book acts as a portal to a virtual liminal garden, a transitional space where remedy and poison meet.
The project draws on the Greek concept of pharmakon, which signifies both medicine and poison, as well as on occult traditions and marginalized herbal knowledge. Each page of the book evokes an imaginary plant, conceived as an active agent within narratives of transformation.
Technically, the installation relies on a combination of 3D animation, analog video, and visual recognition. Each page of the book contains an ArUco marker that triggers the playback of a video within a virtual environment created in Blender. These projected videos form an immersive visual and sonic ecosystem, enriched by an audio composition by Roger Tellier-Craig. The interaction between the book and the digital world creates a hybrid experience in which consultation becomes a ritual of passage.
Sabrina Ratté is a Canadian artist based in Montreal, who also lived and worked for six years in Paris. Her practice explores the perceptual and material potentials of digital media through 3D animation, analog video, print, and installation. Drawing from technology, philosophical thought and speculative ecology, her work maps liminal zones where relationships between material and virtual worlds are reconfigured. Through immersive and interactive installations, she develops hybrid cosmologies that question the evolution of our environments and the narratives that shape them. Her works evoke possible futures, both sublime and unsettling, in which the organic, the synthetic, and the spectral coexist within a single continuum.
Sabrina Ratté’s work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally. She has notably held solo exhibitions at the Gaîté Lyrique (Paris), Fotografiska (Shanghai), Arsenal art contemporain (Montréal and New York), and the MEET Digital Culture Center (Milan). Her next solo exhibition will be presented at the Turku City Art Museum (WAM) in Finland in October 2026. Her work is part of several permanent collections, including that of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and has been exhibited at institutions such as the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, the Arlington Museum of Art (Texas), HEK – Haus der Elektronischen Künste (Basel), Centre PHI (Montréal), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Max Ernst Museum (Brühl), and the Museum of the Moving Image (New York).