Thomas Garnier has been selected as the EMAP 2026 resident at the WRO Art Centre in Wrocław.

As part of this project, iMAL is very pleased to collaborate with WRO Art Centre by making our fablab facilities available for the production of the work.

Across the globe, buildings, districts, and entire cities are rising at a dizzying pace. Stricken by premature obsolescence, these structures transition directly from construction sites to modern ruins without ever being inhabited—from "ghost cities" to "tofu-dreg buildings," they embody the phenomenon of instant ruins.

Cenotaph is a mechanized installation that continuously moves, builds, and dismantles concrete sculptural elements, generating the evolving landscape of an infinite model city. Beneath the surface of this device, a secondary layer collects the debris and waste of this ongoing production. Meanwhile, a moving camera system travels through the inner depths of the architecture, producing a live tracking shot that plays with scale and shifts the viewer’s perspective.

By definition, a cenotaph is a funerary monument erected in honor of a deceased person whose body remains elsewhere. True to its name, this automated city has been deserted from its inception, devoid of any practical function. This anti-architecture stands as a monument to a suspended promise: an environment designed for a human presence that will never arrive.

Born in 1991, Thomas Garnier is a French visual artist and architect whose practice explores the lifespan of the built environment through the lens of digital automation. A graduate of the ENSAPVS and Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains, he was awarded the ADAGP “Digital Arts Discovery” prize for his installation Cenotaph.

Garnier utilizes state-of-the-art production – including advanced robotics, 3D printing, and environmental engineering – to revive pre-cinematic traditions such as phantasmagoria and Pepper’s Ghost. His work functions as a “technical hauntology,” where the precision of contemporary machines is used to reanimate the ghosts of architectural history. From automated concrete models that perpetually build and unbuild themselves to robotic shadow-plays of “dark factories,” his installations create a dialogue between the weight of industrial remains and the ephemeral nature of the digital loop.

By merging 18th-century romantic imagery with AI-generated landscapes of servers and logistics hubs, Garnier documents a world caught between construction and decay. His practice reveals an archaeology of the present: an unstable, illusory space where the distinction between the archaic and the futuristic begins to dissolve.