L ’ Y-PRÉSENCE
An artistic trail featuring 14 Hotspot structures and an installation in a cave l'y - présence
RESIDENCE PRISME - Artigues - prés - Bordeaux - BAM Projects - Bordeaux Métropole 2023/24
Le droit au paysage pour tous-tes les vivant-es .
The Right to Landscape for All Living Beings.
Artigues, a town on the outskirts of the Bordeaux metropolitan area, lies within a dense urban fabric between the ring road, the main road, and the motorway. It developed in the 1970s and 80s with a growing number of detached houses. The predominantly rural natural environment has been replaced by an intrusive, repetitive, and anonymous one, punctuated by an architectural heritage consisting of five estates, including a château.
The natural landscape has become scarce, scattered among built-up plots, and now appears as remnants in place of castle grounds, meadows, and vineyards. This has reduced residents' free access to land, depriving them of their connection to the place and the environment.
Faced with solastalgia, or eco-anxiety, which is increasingly affecting people, there is an urgent need to revitalize our "green" and "living" heritage by offering greater proximity, intimacy, and shared experiences in order to continue cultivating possibilities for our shared future.
The artistic intervention in the town's outdoor space offers an opportunity to contemplate and connect with the remaining surrounding landscape. In these vegetal "ruins," we can observe other living beings more closely, our fellow inhabitants, so precious in a declining and threatened ecosystem in the Anthropocene era. The project aims to demonstrate the necessary respect for their way of functioning, for their territory, our shared territory.
The artwork, installed in the natural space, becomes a mediator between humans, the landscape, and all living things, whether plant or animal, and transforms into a truly democratic space. It highlights the gifts offered by nature, those shared by all, by weaving connections between inhabitants over time, thus sustainably uniting past, present, and future. It forces us to rethink our way of occupying the Earth by erasing the boundaries between niches, territories, occupants, by diluting the notions of interior and exterior spaces, by undergoing climatic events and the passage of time.
The artwork finally opens our eyes to a widespread social blindness, awakens our senses, develops and sharpens them by reminding us of our dependence on Nature and other living beings. The decline or isolation of a species leads to a rupture in these interrelationships with others, weakening the whole, including humankind. The aim is to demonstrate this interdependence by offering a transitional work, temporarily anchored in matter, which would unite with the world to reveal its pulse, now almost invisible to most of us.
There is a need to "hear the Earth," as the geographer Augustin Berque proclaims. Drawing on a certain Japanese philosophy close to Nature, he encourages us, in developing his concept of Mesology, "to keep our feet on the Earth—the planet—and on a land—a unique territory—so as not to endanger the very existence of humanity on our planet."
There is an urgent need to "re-terrestrialize," to re-anchor ourselves in the concrete by cultivating relationships with our environment, between things, between humans and non-humans.
It is urgent that we move beyond the binary concept, which fails to grasp the world as it is concretely experienced, and rid ourselves of this social organization and its representations that emerged in the 16th century with the expansion of colonial capitalism and the advent of racial and sexual epistemologies. We live in a world dependent on highly polluting fossil fuels, responsible for global warming, a world where living beings have been scientifically classified by species, race, and sex. The "petro-sexo-racial" era, according to Paul B. Preciado, can only lead to our downfall.
There is an urgent need to change the paradigm and establish a right to landscape for all living beings.
A Path of Visibility of Life
The proposed route takes the form of a path of visibility of life and nature as a whole. It is punctuated by sculptures and culminates in a natural sanctuary, ostentatiously displaying what must be considered sacred in our rather hazy world. The idea is to develop the territory by creating connections between nature and culture, between human and non-human, between the visible and the invisible. It aims to inspire a certain "here and now" meditation, to disconnect from all digital or virtual spaces, in order to experience "the presence of" something tangible, a concrete presence that allows for the exaltation of the place and the moment.
Fourteen architectural structures made of wood and vegetation, like wild hotspots found in deserted and de-urbanized areas, are attached to remarkable trees, wise among the wise, for their fabulous communicative, community-building, and intergenerational powers. Each sculpture, deliberately open in form, becomes a bastion, an anchor point connecting an environment and living beings, offering itself as a space for reconnection conducive to exchange, a symbolic hub of reconciliation. Seven "stations" are placed at the top of the site and seven at the bottom of the path. They become places of high biodiversity concentration, illuminating and sharpening our awareness of life and our role in the face of a damaged nature that must be saved. The surface treatment, using "stone-effect" plaster, facing bricks, and other glazes, echoes that used in the numerous housing developments bordering the town's parks. Outside, plant-patterned paints, reminiscent of certain wallpapers, accentuate this desire to break with the inside/outside divisions established in traditional dwellings, and invite us to rethink our relationship to space while respecting the space of our fellow residents. This pictorial covering also echoes the shadows cast by the surrounding trees, ephemeral reflections of the present moment.
From structure to structure, we experience the territory. Our exaltation, our sensitivity, and our presence in the place assert themselves and guide us halfway toward an ultimate, more intimate space offering contemplation and meditation. The cave in the woods becomes a highly symbolic sanctuary, a protected and protective zone highlighting nature at work, which must be rendered permanent and intangible. Outside, the visible strata of the Earth's formation, and inside, in continuity with "Great Nature," a "Little Nature" imbued with landscape compel our singular gaze, to respect.
The rhythm of walking, which encourages reflection, is interrupted. The walker can pause for a moment, stop their stroll, and, by shifting their perspective, take stock of their impact on the environment and their relationship with other living beings.
A brilliant light radiates from the cave, highlighting the sacred nature of the elements present.
Each person, in the concrete moment of the unique experience, undergoes an inner journey that will lead them to "re-terrestre" themselves, in other words, to re-situate themselves in their environment, which is also that of other living beings who are just as respectable and essential to the balance of all.
Karinka Szabo-Detchart
L’y-présence , mars 2024.