Inspired by the enchantment scene from Armide (1686) by Jean-Baptiste Lully, based on Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, Il giardino di Armida transforms the spectator into the subject of an immersive seduction.

Using the passthrough capabilities of a Meta Quest headset, the installation begins within the participant’s real physical surroundings. As the Passacaille unfolds, virtual forms progressively emerge inside the visible world, slowly invading and transforming it until reality itself dissolves into an oneiric landscape.

The participant becomes a contemporary Renaud: no longer observing the enchantment from outside, but experiencing it directly.

The virtual environment is composed of photographic fragments extracted from the urban landscape — torn placards, street textures, traces, and found objects — digitally abstracted and transformed into translucent three-dimensional forms. Elements of the contemporary city mutate into unstable architectures suspended between ruin, memory, and hallucination.

The soundtrack consists of the Passacaille from Armide, performed by the artist on harpsichord in the transcription by Jean-Henri d’Anglebert. Originally conceived to accompany a magical scene on the seventeenth-century stage, the music here becomes the temporal structure through which the immersive transformation unfolds.

The work explores mixed reality not as a separate virtual realm, but as a gradual contamination of reality itself.

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