Eve in Modern Eden
Line of Inquiry
Contemporary Myths of Optimisation
Introduction
The story of Eve has never disappeared.
It has simply changed its language.
Today, the serpent rarely appears as a serpent. Paradise no longer exists as a distant garden. Even God speaks less through religion than through promises of self-improvement, optimisation, beauty, productivity, health, and fulfilment.
The body becomes the place where all of these voices meet.
This line of inquiry asks how contemporary image culture rewrites one of the oldest myths in Western culture. Rather than approaching the Fall as a single historical event, I am interested in the possibility that it has become a permanent condition, one that encourages us to keep moving towards a better version of ourselves while ensuring that arrival always remains just out of reach.
Central Question
What happens when God, the serpent, paradise, and the fruit no longer exist outside the body, but become internalised within it?
Digital collage study exploring how Eve's body embodies God, the serpent, the apple, and paradise
About this Line of Inquiry
I don't approach Eve simply as a biblical figure.
She becomes a conceptual body through which recurring cultural narratives can be examined.
The promises surrounding today's body often sound remarkably familiar: become better, become healthier, become more desirable, become more disciplined, become your true self.
The language has changed, but the structure remains.
Rather than seeing beauty culture, wellness industries, self-help, and optimisation as separate phenomena, this research approaches them as contemporary myths—stories that promise transformation while continually producing new forms of dissatisfaction.
Through collage, image collecting, and visual research, I explore how these promises circulate through images and how they gradually become part of the body's own internal dialogue.
Research Directions
Beauty culture
Wellness
Optimisation
Self-correction
Self-improvement
Digital aspiration
Paradise as promise
Consumption
Desire
The continuous Fall
Current Investigation
The Body Embodies Eden - Villa Arson Nice Residency proposal
Current research develops through material prepared for the Magnetic 5 Residency proposal at Villa Arson in Nice.
The French Riviera functions here not simply as a geographical location, but as a contemporary image of paradise, a landscape where leisure, beauty, youth, tourism, luxury, and aspiration converge into a powerful visual mythology.
Counter-Archive in Progress
The counter-archive gathers fragments from wellness campaigns, fashion imagery, beauty advertising, self-help language, tourism photography, historical paintings, and religious iconography.
Rather than separating these image worlds, it allows them to collide, revealing how contemporary myths borrow the visual structures of much older narratives.
Current Outputs
Residency proposal
Digital collage studies
Archive gathering
Visual mapping
Research notes
Project Manifestations
The Body Embodies Edenm, Magnetic 5 Residency Proposal
Developed for the Magnetic 5 Residency at Villa Arson, this proposal investigates the French Riviera as a contemporary image of paradise.
Rather than researching a place, it examines an image world: one where beauty, pleasure, fulfilment, and optimisation become visible ideals that continually reshape the body.
Research Archive
Current investigations connected to this line of inquiry will gradually appear here.
Perhaps the Fall never ended.
Perhaps it simply moved inside the body.
Every promise of becoming better carries with it the possibility of never becoming enough.
Eve in Modern Eden explores that endless movement, not towards paradise, but towards the images that continue to promise it.
