ARTIST
ON THE NATURE OF PARADISE: ORIANE THOMASSON'S ATLANTIS
WORDS: MERI UTKOVSKA
PHOTOGRAPHS: ORIANE THOMASSON
September 24, 2026
It is the gaining of paradise that subjects us to its loss. Insofar as being subjected to such loss is a thing of (un)fortunate circumstance—disruptive and obstinate to the point of ruin—I begin by exploring endings as beginnings. That is, Atlantis.
In his dialogues Timaeus and Critias, Plato introduces the idea of Atlantis as a great kingdom, rich not only in material treasures but also in virtue and morality. A sort of paradise, if you will. He, however, also introduces the idea of its fall. So, as those virtues and morality begin to wane under corruption's growing desire for more power, steps in Zeus and summons the gods to decide how to punish the Atlanteans. Massive floods and earthquakes begin to happen, and “the island of Atlantis was swallowed up by the sea and vanished,” Plato says. We have no way of knowing if this was due to what those gods decided. With Atlantis gone, we can argue that the prospect of its existence would have come to an end. But there is a mysterious urge when something ends to find out what happens to it after—once something is gone, the void of its absence becomes a constant of seeking. Perhaps this seeking can be traced back to our fear of death, as death is the final ending—rigid beyond doubt. But when Oriane Thomasson decided to reimagine the myth of Atlantis in her latest photobook Atlantis, she stood on the precipice of its ruin and tampered with that rigidity, beginning, can we say, where paradise ended. And in this end-beginning, Thomasson’s photographs are not static—they float upon the eye and mind as days of windless calm. So, can paradise again be found not by renouncing loss, but by living in its aftermath? She seems to think so.
Paradise, then, I can say, exists as a construct of two parallels—inception (gain) and completion (loss). Between the two—time, suspended into now. Let’s consider the origin of the word paradise. From the Old Iranian pairidaēza, combining pairi- (around) and daēza- (wall or clay), it first referred to a ‘walled enclosure’ or ‘enclosed garden’. Passing later through Old Persian (paridaida), Greek (paradeisos), Latin (paradisus), and finally, Old French (paradis), it morphed (renewed) only to carry its meaning forward as something protected. That is to say, the Garden of Eden.
When I started writing this article, I couldn’t shake off the feeling of similarity between Atlantis and the Garden. Both places were perfect manifestations of the physical and mental. Both had everything required for life. And in the midst of both these places of absolute perfection, a thought was born which, once manifested into reality, brought forth an ending, which is ultimately what we are talking about here. Or, since thought can only be an idea and the Atlanteans and Eve were driven by something almost primal, perhaps a better word would be urge—from the Latin urgere, meaning “to press hard, push forward”. Yet this urge seems to be different. When Eve bites the apple and offers it to Adam, she is driven by curiosity but also by temptation and ambition. We could say that Milton here invites the reader to explore the complexity of having free will and using it to make a choice, which then inevitably results in the consequences of exercising it. We can see Eve committing the act through the eyes of the narrator:
So saying, her rash hand in evil hour
Forth reaching to the fruit, she pluck’d, she eat:
Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe
That all was lost.¹
That all was lost. Meaning, paradise was lost. Driven then by a desire to know more, insofar as to know more is to have more, having already had all, the simple act of eating a fruit is engulfed by a devastating amount of importance.
The Atlanteans, however, were driven by arrogance, though we cannot actually see them exercising it. Plato’s Critias famously ends mid-narrative, unfinished:
…and there were ten kings of Atlantis, and they ruled over the island and its colonies; and they were all descended from Poseidon, and each king had his share of the land, and he was the supreme ruler of his portion, and all of them together ruled the whole island. And after a long time, they began to grow arrogant because of their power and wealth, and they planned to…²
One could say it falls into stillness though it builds up to describe a great war. One could also say that it falls into ruin—the void of it, boundless, awaiting another beginning. Now, if these events are looked at from, say, the position of their future states, the characters might even abstain from causing them. That is, if we also look at the characters as perfect examples of morality—not distressed by flaws, uncorrupted by human nature. This, however, is not what I am doing here, and certainly not what Thomasson has done in her Atlantis. She explores these flaws by documenting what their acting out leaves behind, thus setting the stage for free interpretation. Sort of like what Milton does when he gives Eve the power to weave her free will.
Let us now consider the stillness of things. In her 2021 essay Stillness, Anne Carson compares Emily Dickinson’s poem 465 with Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), because, she says, “both works combine vision, blindness, and bravado, taking away one subject matter to allow the appearance of another; both manipulate stillness to give a bit of a shock.”³ I like to put Thomasson’s work on the myth of Atlantis in the same company: if Atlantis has been asleep in her eternal underwater darkness since the day it sank, Thomasson now brings her to the surface by entertaining the idea of living amongst her ruins. She breathes life where life has been absent for thousands of years.
This reimagination of not only a story but its rigid finality proves Thomasson an artistic seeker—one not confounded by endings but exorbitant in the limitlessness of exercising her craft. Her changing of narrative is manifest even as she combines archival material with her own photographs: an amalgamation of past and present so as to disrupt the future, that is, our perception of things. This, after all, is the artist’s duty: “to disturb the peace,” said Baldwin.⁴ So, if Dickinson's poem and Rauschenberg’s drawing and Baldwin’s statement and Milton’s paradise are all disturbances of the stillness and peace of things, then Thomasson's Atlantis punctuates in much the same way a seemingly irreversible fate. Can we not also say that such fate came to be precisely because of a disturbance of peace—an interference with the current state of things, which is in its making a sort of violence?
What differs in these situations is the result. The result differs because of the type of shock. If x(x being Atlantis pre-fall) plus y (y being the Atlanteans corruption) equals z (z being the fall of Atlantis), then the story’s ending leaves an opening for Thomasson to walk in and write her own calculations. Which is what she does. In fact, she further explores this idea of sprouting life among ruins (stillness-shock-new subject matter) in her short story The Meteors:
A silver willow had been miraculously preserved from the Engulfment. The tree had completely adapted to life underwater, filtering salt water through its spongy bark, which gently contracted to pump the water back into its body in the form of oxygen. The willow even synthesised the sodium and fluoride in the water, transforming them into nutrients that enabled it to continue growing. Its long silvery leaves had taken on an iridescent green sheen, and its slender branches had become translucent and limp like anemone tentacles, revealing the fluorescent sap that flowed through them. Due to its location in the Palace courtyard, only the royal family could come and contemplate it. A yellow ribbon moray eel with a single midnight-blue spot on its belly was hiding in a cavity in its trunk…⁵
It is evident that what Thomasson aims to do in Atlantis is to preserve life—not as it was but as it could be. I like to think that we have that in common. The neon colours on the lionfish swimming somewhere where colour should be obscured by light’s absence do not scream but quietly affirm life. She makes sure to preserve that. The Oinochoe (that is, a Grecian wine jug dating to the 4th century) with a globular body in muted terracotta excavated from what-has-been’s womb holds now no wine, yet the bittersweet taste of wine wells up in the mouth when one looks at it. She preserves its purpose. Nestled in museums as it is nestled between Atlantis’ pages, with spectators imagining weddings and birthdays and funerals (as the oinochoe was also often used in choai and placed within children’s graves), it is still a thing which held something that was meant to be shared with others.⁶
There are trees growing in the midst of desert heat and sand dunes, and crossings carved through rock and stone in Oriane’s world. It is her world, this life-preserving ritual she performs with her camera. And this world of hers is not neatly tucked away in some secret drawer, far from the curious eye of the observer. It is a world of invitations—a thing which is meant to be shared with others. The lemons growing in moss green on a tree of unknown location are an invitation to see—to feel the sour fragrance of a recurring late fall. There is a cherry tree beside me as I’m writing this and it is now stripped of its bloom. Every leaf is buzzing with the memory sound of bees; the afternoon light filters through the old leaves and branches, and falls on the ground where fall grass still holds. I don’t know why life happens, but I know it is a kind of paradise: how the sun rises over and over and over again on this world battered by grief and wind and dust and joy; how it also sets, unmoved by war or greed or newborn cries, or even love.
Consider, now, paradise as a state of being. The sun rises and the sun sets and the sun is unmoved by any of it; yet stand on the precipice of a sunrise or sunset and really see it, and all the gods and devils will surely stand to see with you. We can argue here that the internal state of being not only allows but, to some degree, predetermines how all physical things will unfold in the world. Had it not been for Eve’s curiosity and determination to venture into the unknown corners of the Garden, the Garden would not have been lost; same goes for the Atlanteans. Both parties had to first be in a certain state of mind which, once actualised into the physical, altered their way of being.
Pathos (from the Greek πάθος) can be translated, among other things, as “experience”. But this experience is no automated act. This is the act of complete and total immersion into otherness— a dropping down of thought, narrative, self even. And in this dropping down, in this utter and absolute presence, one can say, is paradise. Or, since I am exploring endings as beginnings, perhaps I can say, end-beginning—a notion of fleetingness made sacred. It has always astonished me, how bittersweet life actually is: like a rainy day that suddenly gives way to clear, warm sun. Photography, I believe, exists to help us keep a taste of what has been.
Take Thomasson’s photograph of the bubble coral (Lat. Plerogyra sinuosa) in pink and faint green.
Submerged in the shallow waters of the Indo-Pacific, this species lives almost entirely self-sufficient. It doesn’t need much light; it feeds from its own body, and when that doesn’t suffice, it reaches its tentacles through the ocean’s gentle flow and captures plankton. It has adapted perfectly to its environment, making it hard to imagine that some day in the very near future, it could go extinct. It could no longer be. In fact, due to climate change, the world has already lost 30 to 50 percent of its coral reefs, and as the oceans continue to warm and become more acidic, more are facing extinction as well. More could no longer be.⁷
Yet the transitory nature of living and breathing things has never been a subject of discussion; all is transitory. The word transitory comes from the Latin word transire, meaning “to pass through,” and unlike the word, say, extinct (Lat. extinctus), it contains in itself—however faint-–the possibility of repetition. A chance to pass through again. If, let’s say, this rapidly warming, beautiful Earth doesn’t completely turn on us, given the opportunity to start healing, the bubble coral and its relatives can continue to grace (to pass through) their reef habitats. That is, if the narrative surrounding climate change can be changed. And to allow change to happen, otherness must first be made into sameness—not for the sake of erasing differences, but for acknowledging those differences’ right to exist as true.
Thomasson not only seems to know this, but exercises it through her work. Facing us with the Plerogyra sinuosa coral, she tells the truth: here is a thing which lives; here is a thing which shares life with us; here is a thing which passes through and, should we not give it the opportunity of restoration among its ruining home, it will never pass through again.
Among those helping to provide that opportunity is Kenzie Cooke—a University of Miami Rosenstiel School PhD student working with the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS). Cooke is “testing the impacts of enhanced alkalinity during early life stages of coral recruits, assessing survivorship and using state-of-the-art robotics and high-tech CT scanners to look at skeletal density.”⁸ As seawater becomes more acidic (something called ocean acidification), corals grow at a slower rate, and their skeletons become more fragile, so many practitioners are now trying to grow them in a restoration pipeline. But corals take a long time to grow enough to be outplanted. What Cooke is trying to do by manipulating the water’s alkaline properties is “shorten the time it takes to grow outplant-ready corals, and give them a headstart in life by strengthening their skeletal integrity.”
Creating a world in the center of the center of a world on the brink of extinction. One could say that this ability to first imagine the possibility of creating such a world is finding paradise—the opening of the imagination into something not yet conceived, let alone born, is a step into the garden; it is a plunge into Atlantis’ deep and ancient waters.
There are other creatures roaming those depths—ancient creatures that are proof and memory of a life we were not yet part of; creatures whose shells and fins and skin depend entirely on the state and movement of seawater and, should those be disturbed, life as they know it ceases to exist.
Let’s consider the coelacanth. Dating back 410 million years, it is a species that swam the oceans long before dinosaurs had evolved.⁹ In fact, at the very beginning of the age of the dinosaurs, the Triassic Period, coelacanths were abundant on every continent. But since the youngest known coelacanth fossil is 66 million years old, scientists considered these animals to have gone extinct along with the dinosaurs during the End-Cretaceous extinction.¹⁰ That is, until 1938, when one was caught in a trawl net off the coast of South Africa.
Coelacanths are one of the longest-living fish species and, like deep-sea sharks, grow very slowly. They have a lifespan of around 100 years, and need 69 years to reach sexual maturity. The eggs hatch in the mother, where the embryos develop along with their large yolk sacs (fig. 2) during a 5 year gestation period.
This is a creature referred to as a “living fossil,” though it has evolved, utterly slowly, with the elapse of time. Coelacanths used to live in shallow coastal seas, lakes and rivers. Now, they can only be found in the far depths—90 to 300 meters deep in ocean caves and volcanic slopes.
It has taken surviving all five of Earth’s mass extinctions (Ordovician–Silurian, ~443 Ma; Late Devonian, ~372–359 Ma; Permian–Triassic ("the Great Dying"), ~252 Ma; Triassic–Jurassic, ~201 Ma; and Cretaceous–Paleogene, ~66 Ma), and adapting to the new environments left in their wake for this species to become a true Lazarus taxon.¹¹ So, we can’t really be surprised that Thomasson chose this photograph to be part of her Atlantis; if the repetitive cycle of living among ruins after having lived in a wondrous world of abundance is the story, there is no better storyteller than this—the fish that resurged, proving a world wrong.
Let’s travel now to the surface, where collapse meets creation in a more apparent form. Set against ground heaped in remains of sixth-century earthquakes and potential ancient tsunamis in the valley of the Alpheios and Kladeos rivers on the western side of the Peloponnese, lie the fallen Doric columns of the Temple of Zeus. (Fig. 3, Untitled, from the series Atlantis, 2020–2025)
Built between 470 and 457 BC under the architectural direction of Libon, and rising more than twenty meters high, it was the largest temple in ancient Greece. It had a peripteral form, with a portico in the front and was surrounded by columns in a 6 x 13 formation. Because it was impossible to carve an entire column from a single piece of stone, the builders stacked the drums like blocks, with no binding material between. Each column drum measured 2.25m in diameter and roughly 1m in height, weighing somewhere from 2.5 to 4 tons. Inside, at the far end of the temple’s cella, a chryselephantine statue of the colossal Zeus—sculpted by Pheidias—was housed; another, of Zeus Horkios (Zeus of the Oath), was placed in the Bouleuterion, where athletes competing in the Olympic Games would swear their oaths of fair play.
"But Zeus, the god of gods,” writes Plato in Critias, “ who rules according to law, and is able to see into such things, perceiving that an honourable race was in a woeful plight, and wishing to inflict punishment on them, that they might be chastened and improve, gathered together all the gods into their most holy habitation..."
He’s referring here, of course, to the people of Atlantis. But it only seems appropriate, taken into account this god’s omnipotence, that the place for swearing a sacred oath would be precisely under his ever-watchful eye. After all, the god of gods decided that the Atlanteans lost their virtues and, according to Plato’s Timaeus, wiped out their entire civilisation in a single day and night. Not many are those who would even entertain the thought of breaking the word given to such a deity.
But even gods shudder under nature’s inexorable will. People—worshipers and others alike—astonishingly quickly abandon the places and things they’ve attached themselves to, once faced with it. History tells a plethora of truth and lies, and yet the veracity of this behaviour is unmistakable. I can argue here that such behaviour has to do with human selfishness, but then again, I can also argue that it has to do with the internal urge to know what’s beyond (the confines of worship, I mean). The latter, I believe, is where the inception of another kind of paradise is found. What Oriane Thomasson does by offering this photograph in her book is refocusing the lens—from the grandeur of architectural wonder and the structures of ancient societies, to nature’s way of perseverance.
The fact of the matter is this: what was once a place of arresting worship and glory is now reduced to a domino-style residue overgrown by lichens, mosses, and hardy rock-dwelling weeds. An entirely disparate world prevails, allied through the porous limestone fallen on the ground to a time long past, when the warm winds blowing over the sea spoke the word of the god of gods.
Now, if I follow those winds across the Peloponnese and to the northeast, on a hill in the Argolid plain from where, on a very clear day the Aegean sea can be seen licking the shore, I get to where the underground Cistern of Mycenae is.
Carved deep into the citadel rock by the engineers of the Late Helladic IIIB (c. 1250 BCE) as part of the defence system, this underground water reservoir ensured the Mycenaean’s survival during times of war and siege. An architectural marvel descending 19 meters below the surface through a dark tunnel lit, in the past, by clay lamps on shallow shelves every ten steps, the cistern proved that power can be wielded by a mere redirection of water, feeding, by doing so, resilience and life. One cannot see the cistern in Thomasson’s Atlantis—she only shows the doorway—an inverted “V” shape of hewn Cyclopean limestone blocks stacked together in a corbelled arch, still standing today. These blocks were so massive, in fact, that the classical Greeks later believed only Cyclops had the strength to lift and stack them, hence the name.
It is only appropriate for a structure engulfed in such mysticism and practical importance to be part of an epic. That is, Agamemnon, before marching to Troy. Legend says that the great king drank from this spring and ventured into a ten-year-long war; and though we have no way to know if this is true, it still speaks about the cistern as a symbol of grandeur and strength.
It is an invitation, this arched doorway of the Cistern of Mycenae and Thomasson’s photograph of it, to walk the stairway connecting present with past and recognize the fragmented reality of what was not as final but continuate. Drops of water now break silence in a space once filled with footsteps. Darkness covers the clay lamps' absence. And under this new found world’s arm, lingers an inadvertent echo of the Perseia spring—Mycenae’s own paradise.
There are many different paradises in Oriane Thomasson’s Atlantis that I didn’t get around to in this article—islands; seas; snow-covered mountains; faraway rocky shores; the marble seats of honour, or prohedria (from the Greek προεδρία) at the Theatre of Dionysus; the silver willow in “The Meteors” thriving underwater. And, in fact, a great many paradises outside of the book, the most important perhaps being today: an ordinary fall day graced by warm sun and swollen plums.
It is the gaining of paradise which subjects us to its loss, but it is in the capacity for life in this aftermath that it can again be found. The confines of the imagination are thus shattered—whether through fiction or documentary—giving way to new discovery. Thomasson’s Atlantis is a visceral reminder of that.
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.¹²
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Atlantis is an eclectic collection of photographs by Oriane Thomasson (FR), interwoven with archival images. Through these visual correspondences, she constructs a photographic fiction around the legend of Atlantis.
The myth of Atlantis, as recounted by Plato in Timaeus and Critias, describes a magnificent, vast, and prosperous island endowed with fertile land and abundant natural resources. Its inhabitants, descendants of Poseidon, lived in a society organised in harmony with nature. Over time, their ambition led them to expand their empire and exploit new resources, provoking the wrath of Zeus. As punishment, the god unleashed a devastating cataclysm that submerged the island beneath the waves.
Within the myth of Atlantis, two temporalities coexist: an idyllic present and its future submersion. A paradise that already contains the seeds of its own collapse. What remains are ruins. In an era of upheaval, as our narratives of progress begin to fracture, new configurations invite us to imagine ways of prospering—or even proliferating—with ruins, much like certain forms of marine life appropriate foreign elements within their environment. The art of living among ruins may offer a way of inhabiting uncertainty and instability more fully, a mode of thinking that appears today richer than the ambition of merely preventing collapse. In Atlantis, what seems destined to disappear through submersion gives rise to unexpected forms.
Through this free reinterpretation of the myth, Thomasson creates her own narrative, composed of a photographic series and an original science-fiction short story entitled The Meteors. Together, they develop a reflection on lost paradises, collapse, and ruins, in resonance with our contemporary moment. This fiction of a lost paradise unfolds through associations of images. It is built both through the mental and imaginary representation of a wondrous territory and, in parallel, through that of its submersion and the ruins that remain.
Like archaeologists—explorers of the past who bring back fragments of civilisation which, by their incomplete nature, invite narrative speculation and nourish the imagination—the artist weaves a fabric between what is known and what is imagined, between the trace and the invisible, the visible and the buried. What reaches us in an incomplete form may find its completion through fiction. Thomasson thus approaches archaeology and history not as neutral repositories, but as narrative practices whose documents become material for the fiction of her own book.
THE PHOTOBOOK
The book is designed by Rob van Hoesel. According to each category of photographs, five different papers (including one for the text) make up the book:
- a slightly warm paper for photographs evoking the island of Atlantis and its classical Greek landscape;
- a thin, transparent paper, referring to oblivion and disappearance, for the ruins and artifacts, evidence of the culture of lost Atlantis;
- a shorter white paper than the others, to emphasize the idea of "shipwreck" for images that involve a certain transition. These images reflect the sinking of Atlantis itself, but also the disappearance of the island;
- a black paper for underwater photographs to reinforce the sensation of appearances/disappearances and to emphasize the sinking.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Oriane Thomasson is a French artist based in Brussels. Her first photobook, Paradis, was published by The Eriskay Connection in August 2022. Paradis was awarded a place among the Best Dutch Book Designs 2022, shortlisted for the Author Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles, and exhibited during the 2022 edition of Les Rencontres d’Arles. Paradis is now sold out. Her work has been presented in institutions and venues dedicated to contemporary photography such as Contretype and ISELP in Brussels. Her books have also been exhibited and signed at major international fairs, including Paris Photo 2025, the NY Art Book Fair 2025, and Unseen Amsterdam 2022.
Her new series Atlantis was published by The Eriskay Connection in September 2025. Atlantis was partly developed during a research residency at ISELP in 2025, and later presented as an installation in the group exhibition Réminiscences, from April to June 2025.
Through her photographic work, both analog and digital, Oriane Thomasson explores themes of paradise and nature, integrating archives and drawings into her practice. The materiality of images and their transmission enable her to question our visual imagination and the ways in which it is constructed.
ORIANE THOMASSON
NOTES
1. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. 1667. Public Domain Text.
2. Plato, Critias, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Dover Publications, 2000), sec. 121c–d.
3. Anne Carson, “Stillness,” Critical Inquiry 48, no. 1 (2021): 9.
4. James Baldwin, “The Creative Process,” 1962, later collected in “The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction,” 1948-1985
5. Oriane Thomasson, “The Meteors,” in “Atlantis” (The Eriskay Connection)
6. Ancient Greek funeral rituals that include total pourings—where the entire liquid (usually honey, milk, water, perfumes, and olive oil) is poured out on the grave to honor, appease, or communicate with the deceased, ensuring they remain peaceful and do not return as vengeful spirits.
7. “Restoring Coral Reefs,” NOAA Fisheries,
https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/national/habitat-conservation/restoring-coral-reefs
8. Chris Malanuk, “The Robot and the Reef: Can Enriched Seawater Fast-Track Coral Restoration?,” NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, December 15, 2025
9. Martha Henriques, “The Deep Ocean Photographer That Captured a ‘Living Fossil’,” BBC Future, May 7, 2024, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240507-the-deep-ocean-photographer-that-captured-a-living-fossil
10. Anthony Smith, “Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer,” The Guardian, May 21, 2004, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/may/21/guardianobituaries
11. Coelacanths: The Fish That Outdid the Loch Ness Monster,” Natural History Museum https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/coelacanths-the-fish-that-outdid-the-loch-ness-monster.html.
12. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Gordon Teskey (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 12.646–649.