Nelly-Eve Rajotte

Curator : Ariane De Blois

From June 14 2025 to September 7 2025

Musée d’art de Joliette (MAJ)

• crédits: Vue de l’exposition Nelly-Eve Rajotte. Matière. Dans la profondeur de la chair, la délicatesse des machines invasives, Musée d’art de Joliette, 2025. Photo : Paul Litherland
  

About —

Known for her immersive video installations, Nelly-Eve Rajotte presents Matter. In the depths of flesh, the delicacy of invasive machines, her most personal work to date. Based on her own experience with robot-assisted abdominal surgery, Rajotte’s piece involves an operation conducted by the medical robot Da Vinci, and invites us on a fanciful voyage to the heart of an imaginary patient’s body.

Via a large-format projection that combines real images shot by a camera, ones generated by artificial intelligence, and others modelled in 3D, Nelly-Eve Rajotte explores the growing integration of robotics and intelligent systems in the field of medicine. She also questions the complex relationship between medicine, the body, and women’s health.

The first sequences of the video reveal the Da Vinci robot, with its impressive, mechanical, spider-like appearance, as it moves with surprising dexterity thanks to its multiple, articulated limbs. The video then immerses us into the patient’s belly as she is transformed into a teeming, biomorphic landscape.

Through her speculative approach, Nelly-Eve Rajotte adopts a feminist perspective that reconfigures our perception of the body’s materiality. She offers a powerful and sensitive vision of the female body that has ruptured with the objectifying representations of the male gaze, inherited from artistic traditions and scientific knowledge. In Rajotte’s eyes, the interior landscape comes alive and becomes a topography of possibility, where organic forms evoke a vibrant, flowing space full of memories and sensations.

textw: Ariane De Blois

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Matière. Dans la profondeur de la chair, la délicatesse des machines invasives, 2025

Durée 18 min.

Propriété de l’artiste

Crédits :

Nelly-Eve Rajotte: Conception, Scénarisation, Réalisation, Montage, Production, Intelligence artificielle (AI)

Simran Dewan: Direction photo et étalonnage

Henri Carreau: Modélisation et Animation 3D

David Kristian : Musique et Design Sonore

André Simard : Mixage et Mastering

Équipe Tournage CHUM

Frederic Boivin : directeur de production 

Vincent Ménard : assistant de production

Catherine lefebvre : 1^ier assistante caméra

Vincent Plourde-Lavoie : Chef machiniste

Conseil des arts du Canada 

L’artiste remercie le Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM) ainsi qu’au Dr Franck Vandenbroucke-Menu, chef du Service de chirurgie hépatobiliaire, pancréatique et de transplantation hépatique du CHUM.