Forever with You – François-Xavier De Costerd

Artist’s Statement

Living near the ocean has shaped the way I see and experience the natural world. When I photograph the coast at Winter Island and other places along the North Shore, I am captivated by the color and textures from waves, tidal pools, and the millions of years written in the rock.

Spending equal time in the woods on Cape Ann, riding, hiking, and working on trails, I experience the land through seasonal change, summer droughts, winter storms, fallen trees, and shifting paths. Surrounded by the smell of pine and leaves, these landscapes feel eternal. Yet, the constant threat of land development and exploitation mean I’m no longer sure of what will endure after I’m gone.

By merging my painter sensibilities with digital aesthetics, I try to create immersive visual experiences that evoke both beauty and unease. This work lingers in the tension between seduction and disruption, wondering how long we can go on living within structures that promise comfort and progress while harming our health.

In Forever With You, multiple voices enter the work to explain, question, or challenge the viewer, not to provide answers, but to open a space for reflection, resistance, and poetic attention. As Alan Watts reminds us, “You are not a puppet which life pushes around… the real deep down you is the whole universe.”

My print compositions are inspired by moments in my videos. With these, I explore the subtext of a landscape shaped by history, industrial development, environmental negligence, and systems of power. Toxic forever chemicals, uncontainable and unsanctioned, serve as both subject and symbol in my practice, products of a system that manages harm while embedding long-term contamination into our lives and our environment.

In this context, art becomes a counterforce: an act of witnessing and disruption, a refusal to accept systemic profiteering as the inevitable cost of progress.

About the Artist: François-Xavier De Costerd

François is an international award winning multi-disciplinary artist working in video, digital collage, and installation. His practice explores the power of biopolitical systems over bodies, health, and the environment, with a focus on the impact of technology and capitalism on our natural world. Through a layered digital aesthetic, he investigates the presence of forever chemicals as material and metaphor, symbols of how harm is embedded and made invisible by structures of control.

He made the Lumen Prize Shortlist for the Moving Image Award. He has shown works at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Geneva International Film Festival, CyFest in St Petersburg, Beacons Festival in Skipton UK, The Boston Biennale, HUBweek Boston, the Museum of Science Boston, The MIT Museum, the Boston Convention Center, the Boston Sculptors Gallery, Installation Space gallery, Tufts University, Atlantic Works, and performed at First Night Boston, Boston CyberArts, Lynn Arts, and Pixilerations. Some of his video work was featured at the Swissnex dome for HUBweek Boston, Virtual Territories at the Geneva International Film Festival, Beacons Lumen Festival in the UK, and at Illuminus Boston. He is a member of the Soundscape Visions collective, where he has been awarded multiple grants from the Lynn Cultural Council.

François is an artist and educator with a Master’s degree in fine arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. When he isn’t in the studio or out exploring nature, he teaches photography, video, editing and post-production.