Emilien Sallustio is a young french artist who lives and works in Brussels. He was born in the Savoy region to Italian parents. Through a wide range of media and techniques, including drawing, photography and installation, his work explores geographic, historical and political concerns. Using standardized visual materials and representations such as architectural drawing, plans and maps, he creates poetic metaphors on contemporary issues and today’s challenges concerning environment, aesthetic and social conflicts.

Usually working with real-life stories or situations, he now experiments with a fictitious approach, creating what he calls, according to Jeff Wall’s legacy « alternative realities ». This new project intends to describe with a critical approach a new academism of contemporary architecture and the social inequalities it reveals through the conception of a possible unreal architectural project in a « very close to reality » fake city. Due to its standardized character, technical drawing is naturally an appropriate means to objectively describe an object, and at the same time it is not reality, but a projection of it. This expresses the ambiguity of the notion of project, made to be real but still hypothetical until its completion. This new artistic direction brings up an enigmatic and uncanny aspect to his work and opens up new perspectives. He is currently completing a Masters at the Royal Academy of fine Arts in Brussels where he is writing a thesis on the use of fiction in contemporary art.

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