As part of the Transformative Territories project, Parti Poétique is exploring the future of soils and the care of the earth, as well as the struggles and resistance associated with them. This research-creation project is rooted in the two territories where the Parti Poétique is active in France: Zone sensible in the urban environment, and Regains in the rural environment.
Since 2024, Zone sensible has been home to Caroline Le Méhauté, winner of the COAL 2024 for Transformative Territories. Caroline examines the quality of Saint-Denis soil. During her residency, Caroline Le Méhauté invites local residents to share their knowledge and work together to reintegrate earth as a building material in our contemporary societies, by combining ancestral traditional construction techniques with contemporary ones. Inhabitants will then be invited to take part in the process of shaping and constructing the work in raw earth, reclaimed from the excavated soil of local Greater Paris construction sites. Taking the form of a bank of phyto-remediatory seeds (plants with soil-cleaning virtues), this human-scale architecture invites birds to spread them, in Zone Sensible and beyond, suggesting a concrete solution for the ecological transformation of the area.
At the same time, Parti Poétique welcomes Stéphanie Sagot between the spaces of Zone Sensible and Regains, to continue her research into the link between territories and feelings, between earth and tenderness, in order to document reality and present a series of ecologically situated narratives. In the pursuit of her work on concrete ecotopias, the artist meets those who, through an aesthetic and political reappropriation of peasant, agroforestry and market-gardening know-how (…), are inventing new ways of being and of making the world, and, by the same token, new concrete narratives in the face of the anti-utopian conditions of our contemporaneity. This work draws on the practices of artist, art researcher and mindfulness meditation, as well as trance, in a connection to all living things. Following her first project, Cartes de Tendre – Terres amoureuses, at Zone Sensible, Stéphanie Sagot will focus on the Camargue region from Regains. Here, she explores the fragility of marine and saltwater ecosystems, as well as farming practices and struggles.
The proposals put forward by the two artists are participatory projects, inviting the public to rethink and get involved in reinventing the land, so that it once again becomes a place of production that cares for the living, and beyond that, a place of reinvention and transformation, a space for creating and disseminating links and sensitive knowledge.
Read more at the partner’s website : https://www.parti-poetique.org/
