Author Archives: à demeure

DISNOVATION.ORG

CONTRE-RÉCITS DE L’EAU (COUNTER-NARRATIVES OF WATER)

A narrative video by Disnovation.org

The water cycle in karstic zones of the Haut-Jura Regional Nature Park commissioned from artists’ collective DISNOVATION.ORG by a group of stakeholders: Philippe Perrin, elected representative of La Rixouse and member of the Haut-Jura Regional Nature Park’s trade union committee; three speleologists – François Jacquier, president of the San-Claudien Spéléo-Club, Anne Corriol, a teacher at Montmorot agricultural college and Wim Cuyvers, architect and forester.

The project is part of the programme Art Living Lab for Sustainability (Europe Creative), involving Belgium, Spain and France and the New Patrons programme with the New Patrons Society and À demeure association; it looks at a phenomenon with many grey areas: the circulation of water in karstic environments, how it is understood and how it is represented. This is a major environmental issue today, but one that is little known and often misunderstood by the public. Karst topography is a component of the Jura’s great fractured limestone massifs in which water circulates at great depths. Geographers, hydrogeologists and speleologists are studying this phenomenon, which has led to the launch of a number of initiatives to ensure the future of water resources in the region. While the water present in the karst supplies a third of the population, a heightened alternation of drought and intense rainfall makes it even more vulnerable.
The commission to artists aims to raise awareness of the climate changes taking place and help us better anticipate their consequences for the management, sharing and use of what we collectively consider a ‘common good’. How can we contribute to a better understanding of such a specific geology: a network that is difficult to understand let alone represent?

THE RESPONSE FROM DISNOVATION.ORG COLLECTIVE IN COLLABORATION WITH CLÉMENCE SEURAT

The proposed production takes the form of a narrative video. This visual investigation follows the course of water that seeps into the rock, disappears and resurfaces elsewhere; it traces the deep geological past, recounting anecdotes and collective stories. Karst landscapes exist as sentinel zones in the fields of agriculture, ecology and health, where we can observe a series of tensions linked to water in the present and the future. The collective is combining the resulting study with local and global stories and testimonies in order to open up debate and envisage the common ownership of water, now and in the future.

DISNOVATION.ORG is a research collective founded in Paris in 2012 comprising core members Maria Roszkowska (pl/fr), Nicolas Maigret (fr) and Baruch Gottlieb (ca/de) (fr) that fuses contemporary art, research and hacking to critically translate complex eco-social debates into operational and provocative exhibitions. It creates radical works of art staged as large-scale laboratory experiments focusing on energy, ecology and the economy that function as catalysts for creating futures that diverge from the dominant narratives. The collective’s exhibitions, books and videos permeate global cultural landscapes, fostering critical dialogue at the intersection of artistic, political and scientific enquiry. Clémence Seurat is a publisher, arts programmer and associate researcher at the Sciences Po médialab. She explores the fields of political ecology and techno-criticism, teaches at Sciences Po and lectures at art schools giving regular conferences.

The Art Living Lab for Sustainability project, developed as part of Europe Creative (CREA EU), supports alliances between stakeholders in European territories with the aim of developing artistic responses to questions of eco-responsibility and complex environmental challenges for three types of natural common resources: clay in Flanders, earth in Galicia and water in the Jura. Three organisations approved by the New Patrons programme are supporting this approach: De Niewe Opdrachtgevers in Belgium, Concomitentes in Spain and New Patrons Society in collaboration with association À demeure in France. artlivinglab.eu

Haut-Jura Regional Nature Park supports this programme, providing expertise and skills in water quality, the sharing of water resources, knowledge of local stakeholders, artists and experts. It also facilitates research and meetings. www.parc-haut-jura.fr

New Patrons programme enables citizens who are confronted with social or regional development issues to involve contemporary artists in their concerns through commissioned works. Its originality is based on a partnership between three key players: the artist, the commissioning citizen and the cultural mediator approved by the New Patrons Society, together with public and private partners involved in the project.

Since 2020, the New Patrons Society association has federated a network of mediators and spearheaded the development of this initiative with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Fondation de France. www.lasocietedesnouveauxcommanditaires.org

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The art work has been produced with the support of the New Patron society, the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation and the Europe Creative programme.
With the participation of the San-Claudien Spéléo-Club association and the Haut-Jura Regional Nature Park.

presse-Contre récits de l’eau

Construire / Patrick Bouchain et Loïc Julienne, in Beaumont, Ardèche

Les Bogues du Blat

Rural Social Housing in the Ardèche Cévennes

The Drobie valley, like the whole of the Ardèche area, has undergone a slow process of agricultural abandonment for more than a century, its steep slopes being too restrictive for mechanized agriculture. This change engendered a major rural exodus that reached its peak in the 1970’s. Recently, the valley has experienced new residential and tourist interest, which has created numerous amenities, not always adapted to the challenges of local development.

The Beaumont commune has embarked on construction and development projects to support sustainable development in the face of growing demand for building land or traditional housing. The Blat hamlet was chosen to accommodate a new residential zone and the commune entrusted an architect with the project of creating a rural social habitat based on the house as a basic unit, all the while giving the opportunity to the hamlet’s social group.

The Construire team’s response made it possible to go further than initial intentions, to open up the commission to their experimental approach and to question the possibility of different ways of building. Entrepeneurs, future residents, architects and artists were consulted throughout the project in order to make the construction a cultural act.

Each house is located astride several restanques[1] and is served by a private road, but parking spaces are grouped together and kept away from the dwellings. The faïsses[2] that are not privately owned may be used for common gardens.

Initial construction consists of an arched frame, its cladding and the layout of the ground floor alone (with living room, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom). After that, two options are possible: simple rental with the possibility, among others, for the tenant to extend the living area into spaces left free; or progressive acquisition of the property as part of a set-up defined with the client.

[1] Restanque is a term used for drystone retaining walls built on steep slopes to establish cultivating terrasses.

[2] Land in strips used for agriculture on steep slopes long deforested.

First batch of 3 houses and 4 dwellings/ lodgings: September 2013

Second batch of 3 houses: January 2017

Patrons: Members of Beaumont’s municipal council and Pascal Waldschmidt, mayor of Beaumont, Jacqueling Nielle and Jean-Remi Durand-Gasselin, mayoral deputies.

Funding: Fondation de France, Rhône-Alpes region, General Council of Ardèche (Cap Territoire), Monts d’Ardèche Regional Nature Park (European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development – Leader.)

+ book link:

The Bogues de Blat experiment was the subject of a publication including the story of the commission and Patrick Bouchain’s study book. Captures éditions, 2018

presentation folder, September 2013 – pdf pdf

 

crédits photographiques Loïc Julienne et Phoebé Meyer

Michel Aubry, Vercors Regional Nature Park

The 72 593th Part of the world

Commissioned within the framework of the inter-parks cooperation project Paysage Industriel (Industrial Landscape): Monts d’Ardèche, Lorraine, Pilat, Vercors

The 72 593th Part of the world

Traditional crafts hold an important place in Royans-Vercors’ history. The production of wooden tableware especially, boomed during the second half of the XXth century, with some fifty companies employing more than six hundred workers. Today only four workshops are in operation. The work requested here must draw on the threads of the past to think of the future and account for the territory’s plural realities.

Straight away, Michel Aubry chooses to decompartmentalize his subject and associate the Vercors project with the one taking place in parallel at the Pilat park. His research is based on three works that evoke the industrial landscape and the relationship with natural resources: Paysage avec travaux de la mine (1544) (Landscape with mine work) by Herri met de Bles, Le Feu (1606) (The Fire) by Jan Breughel the Elder and La Sixième Partie du monde (1927) (A 6th Part of the World) by filmmaker Dziga Vertov.

Michel Aubry’s proposal for the Vercors park is inspired by a sequence from La Sixième Partie du monde showing a Siberian shaman who dances “in a costume laden with symbolic objects, both protection and a conductive jacket linked to natural elements.” He rethinks the shaman’s costume and associates it with the sound tubes designed in the turnery tradition. “Like the shaman, sound connects elements coming from the forest to material objects.”

On the 27th September 2014, Marianne Baillot initiated the work with a choreographic performance.

Today The 72 593th Part of the World is part of the Conservation of the Drôme Department collection and is on permanent display in the municipal council room of Saint-Jean-en-Royans. Other variations of the dance are scheduled for the Vercors region.

Press release, September 2014- pdf


Patrons: Members of the Arbre and Engivane associations and the Vercors Regional Nature Park

Funding: Fondation de France/ New Patrons programme, Vercors Regional Nature Park, European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development: LEADER, Department of Drôme, the town of Saint-Jean-en-Royans

 2014

crédits photographiques Phoebé Meyer

Joëlle Tuerlinckx in Cransac

The Cransac Triangular
“Memory Museum – Universal Property®”

Before it was a mining town in the 19th century, Cransac was a village known for its hydrotherapy. After the mines closed in 1961, the city became a spa town again, but collective memory remains tied to its mining past. Changes in landscape and social behaviour are thus essential ideas in Cransac’s recent history.

By using an artist, the patron wanted to go further than commemoration. If the consideration of industrial and mining history remains important, the articulation of past and present must show new concerns related to thermal activity and the evolution of the urban landscape.

The town chose internationally renowned artist, Joëlle Tuerlinckx. From the outset, she became interested in the context of the intervention. Her meetings and discoveries (human, geological, architectural) were recorded in notes and are the subject of audio and visual recordings, the ensemble constituting the genesis of the work.

Joëlle Tuerlinckx develops a project that evokes the entire museum structure and its function: the collection, conservation, inventory, presenting successive exhibitions. But she overturns its schemes and proposes a “museum turned inside out like a glove” based on a triangular of places.

The Cransac Triangular, “Memory Museum – Universal Property ®” consists of the Memory Monument, 34 metres high, erected on the old mine pit head, near shaft No. 1 (the monument represents one 10th of the shaft’s depth) and of two sites designated by the artist as the Memory Museum Vitrine Historique and Vitrine Contemporaine (Historic Window and Contemporary Window).

The title given to the work pays homage to Jean Jaurès: “Universal education, universal suffrage, universal property, that is, if I may say, the true postulate of the human individual.*” The artist retains the universal spirit and utopian dimension of Jaurès’ words.

*“Socialism and freedom” article published in La Revue de Paris, December 1st, 1898.

Press folder, September 2011- pdf

‘Monument-Mémoire’, ‘Vitrine Contemporaine’ et ‘Vitrine Historique’

réalisation et inauguration, le 15 octobre 2011

Patrons: Cransac Municipal Council

Financial Partners: Town of Cransac-Les-Thermes, Fondation de France New Patrons in partnership with the Minister of Culture and Communication (DGCA, DRAC Midi-Pyrénées), Région Midi-Pyrénées, Department of Aveyron, with the participation of Bassin de Decazeville-Aubin Communauté de communes, Forum des associations, Crédit agricole Nord Midi-Pyrénées, Umicore, Chaîne thermale du Soleil–Thermes de Cransac

2011

 

)Photographic credits, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Christoph Fink (except 25, 26 and 27)

Élisabeth Ballet, Monts d’Ardèche Regional Nature Park

You Will Tell Me

You Will Tell Me is Élisabeth Ballet’s response to a commission awarded by elected officials and residents of the former Eyrieux-aux-Serres Community of Communes and the Monts d’Ardèche Regional Nature Park. Today this region, located in the middle range mountain zone, has more than twenty abandoned milling and weaving workshops and the question of their reclassification is recurrent. The Community of Communes wished to reflect on the presence and transformation of this industrial landscape and to address the social dimension of textile work.

In Saint-Sauveur-de-Montagut, the presence of the Moulinon on the banks of the River Eyrieux is strong evidence of local working history. Élisabeth Ballet created a “listening chamber” in the old station stop across the river opposite the old mill. This shelter is painted blue and is preceded by a terrace equipped with two red-brown concrete benches. Inside, a window fitted with a railing was broken open to offer a frontal view of the Moulinon. An audio montage is broadcast in various places to multiply listening points.

“The distance between the factory that we will admire and the site itself,” writes the artist, “will allow the creation of an intangible work.” In the listening chamber, the sounds of the river, the turbine and of nature mingle with noises of machines and voices of factory workers. “These voices invite us to take time to listen to stories of work accomplished here – its price, its joys and sorrows – and thus learn about the workers’ skills.”

press release, May 2014 – pdf

Patrons: elected officials and residents of the former Eyrieux-aux-Serres Community of Communes and the Monts d’Ardèche Regional Nature Park.

Funding: Monts d’Ardèche Regional Nature Park as part of the European LEADER programme (European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development), Fondation de France / New Patrons, Rhône-Alpes Region, former Community of Communes Privas Centre Ardèche.

2014

Photographic credits: Phoebé Meyer

Susanne Bürner, Vercors Regional Nature Park

The Crossing

The Isère and the Work:

The communes on the left bank of the Isère river are situated within Grenoble’s urban expansion and on the historic route linking the Alps to the Mediterranean. Real estate pressure due to proximity to the Grenoble agglomeration and the grouping of communes into communities made these villages reposition themselves in order to preserve their specificities.

In the context of the region’s growing urbanisation, the old industrial sites are part of common imagination in connection with local working class history forged over several generations. Susanne Bürner was invited to take note of this observation. Two emblematic sites were located – the old royal Saint-Gervais canon foundry and the Echaillon quarries.

Susanne Bürner did not want to limit her research to the history of the two communes however, she immersed herself in local geography, visited many sites and collected stories as well as rich iconography on the industrial history of the two banks of the Isère. During the course of her reflections, the river’s role appeared strategic – it facilitated the circulation of goods, people and labour with bridges, boats, rafts and traps. Its strong presence at the foot of the Vercors hills always impresses the traveller. It is also through the eyes of a foreigner, in this case a young boatman, that Susanne Bürner presents fiction in the form of a film, The Crossing. The publication of two leperellos, L’Isère and Le Travail, (The Isère and The Work), combine images, archival drawings and the artist’s own photographs.

invitation, Decembre 2014 – pdf

La Traversée

 

L’Isère and Le Travail (The Isère and The Work)

Artist’s edition, 600 examples

Width of leperello when opened out: 104 x 10.4cm

10 euros for the set

Patrons: Saint-Gervais Commune represented by Madame Faure, the mayor, members of the SPIA association – Sauvegarde du patrimoine industriel d’autrefois (Safeguarding the Industrial Heritage of Yesteryear) and the Vercors Regional Nature Park

Funding: Vercors Regional Nature Park within the Framework of the European LEADER programme (Fonds européen agricole pour le Développement rural), Fondation de France / New Patrons Programme

Film credits: Susanne Bürner, photographic credits: édition Phoebé Meyer

2014