The Gorilla Sees You / The Gorilla No Longer Sees You
2025
15seconds video with sound, disseminated as sponsored content on social media platforms, visible only inside a geofenced perimeter of 1km radius centered on the Arles arena. Triggered by user location, the video appears once per session as a native ad.
8 billboards (176 x 240cm), red text printed on white blueback.
1/3 DIN A4 prospectus in a plexiglass holder.

There are images you hang. Others you buy. And then there are those that fall on you. This one doesn’t try to seduce. It doesn’t explain. It doesn’t ask permission. It arrives, perfectly targeted. It knows where you are: within a one-kilometer radius around the Arles Arena. 
Inside this invisible boundary, a fifteen-second video infiltrates social media: a sponsored ad. A gorilla enters the frame, stops, stands, stares. The signal activates. No walls, only a perimeter. It isn’t visited — it circulates, until the final frame. In this programmed apparition, something flips. Roles reverse. It finds its target and looks back. Outside the circle, it disappears. And as you leave, a sentence, on billboards, marks its limit: THE GORILLA NO LONGER SEES YOU. 
Inside the arena, the animal spams to maintain its visibility, pushing it to the absurd: a hyper-presence. Its prey are always available, confined within the set limits. The gorilla does the dirty job: existing, showing its presence, maintaining contact, and more importantly, creating new ones. The tool targets perfectly, with the precision of a GPS and the structures of algorithms, stealing brain-time from a specific, predefined audience. The gorilla is the ambassador. The artist is the sponsor. In a context of pure visibility, existing becomes a necessity. The mirror is very close, almost human. 
The gorilla sells nothing but presence — and that’s enough. Like in those feeds where the image must appear daily, like in this city obsessed with framing. The gorilla finds you. THE GORILLA SEES YOU. 
Photography, Text, Video
All rights reserved 2025 © Augustin Lignier