Cyprien Gaillard (*1980) works across film, video, photography, collage, installation, and performance, exploring civilizational upheaval, geological time, and a “poetics of entropy” that rearranges history to illuminate the present. He often combines landscapes and architectures from different times, as in Real Remnants of Fictive Wars (2003–08), where fire extinguisher clouds engulf sites like Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Sculptural works range from excavating a German bunker to objects made of shovels and onyx. Social sculptures like The Recovery of Discovery (2011) stage collective appropriation and destruction. Polaroid series such as Fields of Rest and Sober City juxtapose ruins and relics, with the medium emphasizing transience. Films including Desniansky Raion (2007), Nightlife (2015), and Ocean II Ocean (2019) interweave demolitions, natural phenomena, and colonial traces. Gaillard’s audiovisual language recalls Romanticism while critically addressing colonialism, failed modernist ambitions, and the fluidity of capital.