Nelly-Ève Rajotte is a professor at the School of Design at UQAM, where she leads the Moving Image and Sound Design research axis. A visual and media artist, she develops a practice rooted in immersive installation and performance that interrogates contemporary conditions of perceptual experience. Working with moving image and sound, her projects explore non-human regimes of vision and machinic forms of landscape imaging, drawing on technologies such as LiDAR, biosensors, artificial intelligence, and robotics.
Her research-creation is grounded in an inquiry into the sensitive relationships between technology, the body, and the environment, proposing immersive dispositifs that displace anthropocentric perspectives in favor of perceptual alterities and non-human points of view. Recognized for their monumental scale and immersive intensity, her works engage viewers in experiences that reconsider notions of presence, mediation, and cohabitation with technological and living systems.
Her work has been presented in numerous institutional and curatorial contexts in Quebec and internationally, including the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Musée d’art de Joliette, Contemporary Calgary, Emerson Contemporary (US), as well as Occurrence, Clark, Optica, and Circa. It has also been featured in major international festivals and events such as MUTEK (Montreal, Argentina, Mexico, and Japan), Transmediale (Berlin), the International Festival of Films on Art, the International Short Film Festival of Berlin, Lab30, ISEA, and the KIKK Festival (Belgium).
Her works are included in several public collections, including that of Hydro-Québec.
Using video and sound as her primary mediums, Nelly-Eve Rajotte operates at the confluence of performance, image, and installation. Recognized among other things for her monumental projections, Rajotte is interested in the sensitive conditions of the spectator experience. She explores the relationship to space and delves into the branching of physical sensations and psychological states inscribed in reception. Her combined work of image and sound reflects a certain alterity of representation and experience.
Around the recurring figure of the landscape, Rajotte adopts a romantic posture where tensions and oppositional plays of composition allow for the exploration of image construction processes. She borrows from cinematic strategies of editing and staging that not only transform but also aestheticize reality. Streamlined and fragile, the landscape thus asserts itself through the artist’s operations as a cultural object. The sound then accomplishes this “beyond nature” shift of the image by embroidering around it an almost anxiogenic atypical universe. The sound environment doubles the sensitive potential of the work by negating or exalting the discourse of the image. These threads respond to each other, push each other away, and destabilize the reception, ultimately placing it at the heart of the work.
Rajotte’s approach is distinguished by her manifest interest in perception, which she specifies and radicalizes the scope of. This exercise of control is not motivated by technological artifices, but rather by the organization of an environment open to interpretation. Her composition work then resembles that of a painter, augmented by a fundamental temporal dimension of experience. Time materializes the activity of the image and sound, captivates attention, places it in a given space, and finally consents to the senses full power over the work.