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.
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.