OUTSIDE THE WALLS
THE GARDEN IS NOT CLOSED
In association with the Haute Vallée Regional Natural Park
Chevreuse, we created the route The garden is not closed , dedicated
to the links that artists create with the territory, nature and their environment.
The photographers for this course are selected during a call
to international application dedicated to the challenges of global warming and will be exhibited:
On the gates of the Galluis school 78490, on the gates of La Chapelle Clairefontaine in Clairefontaine 78120, on the gates of the Tremblay-sur-Mauldre school 78490,
in the garden of the Jean Monnet House in Bazoches-sur-Guyonne 78490,
and in the garden of La Maison Louis Carré in Bazoches-sur-Guyonne 78490.
GALLUIS
Featuring the work of Photographer Cody Cobb, United States.
SPECTRAL —
These photographs reveal a hidden luminescence in the wilds of the American West. From collapsed lava tubes lined with microbial mats to high altitudes where lichens thrive, a strange fluorescence occurs when certain minerals and organic matter are exposed to ultraviolet radiation. This spectrum of light is invisible to the naked eye. A parallel world is revealed in the night thanks to long exposures and an ultraviolet light source. The strangeness of the light emitted by these otherwise familiar places reveals surfaces that appear alien.
CLAIREFONTAINE
Presents the work of Anaïs Ondet, France.
WITHOUT SUN —
Sans soleil is a work that seeks to express a feeling, a deep unease in the face of the ecological collapse we are witnessing. Anaïs tries, through a corpus of photographs with a dark and nebulous cinematic tendency, to account for the concept of solastalgia. This neologism, invented by the philosopher Glenn Albrecht, expresses the psychological distress caused by environmental changes. Starting from an intimate dimension, she wishes to address a social fact that affects a large part of the younger generations. In what world will we live when all the trees have burned?
As well as the work of Pascal Goet, France.
MASK AND TOTEM —
Mask and Totem is a series by Pareidolia that offers us a look at otherness. These African masks, Native American totems, and other Mexican luchadors scrutinize us. An animality emerges from these large portraits, as if we were ourselves observed by their shamanic souls and a message was passed to us: otherness elevates us, the other is not necessarily disturbing and difference enriches us.
THE TREMBLAY - ON - MAULDRE
Presents the work of Chloé Milos Azzopardi, France.
NON-TECHNOLOGICAL DEVICES —
Non-technological devices are composite tools made from gleaned natural elements, assembled in such a way as to mimic the technological artifices that populate our daily lives. Between rudimentary productions and science fiction creations, these artifacts are as much extensions of bodies as they are obstacles. Associated with invented products whose use remains to be
discover, they create together a fictional universe functioning as a mirror held up to our fantasies of the future. With this project, the artist wishes to create new desires, generate images that can be resources for our imaginations. How can we show an alternative future in the face of our dreams of a hyper-artificialized and technologized world? Using fiction and play, Chloé seeks other ways of imagining augmented lives, creating organic cyborgs whose goal would be to inscribe the body differently in the environment. She uses the poetic shift and diversion of artifacts that are symbols of technical progress to question our relationship with the living and the disappearance of terrestrial "resources" used to build the components of our technological objects. Dealing with human intervention on nature, our relationship with technology and the overexploitation of the planet, this research explores other forms of cohabitation with terrestrial life and opens up avenues of reflection on what could be an iconography of ecological self-defense.
JEAN MONNET HOUSE, BAZOCHES SUR GUYONNE
Featuring the work of Bruce Eesly, Germany.
NEW FARMER —
The images begin to test the viewer, hovering slightly beyond believability until they finally become absurd. These are not documentary photographs from the 1960s as the pamphlet suggests, but images generated by AI (Artificial Intelligence). The story itself, while somewhat reminiscent of real events, is also invented: this alternate version does not end in the giant fields of monocultures that surround us today, but rather leads to oversized vegetables. With absurdity and humor, New Farmer aims to highlight our hubris and oversimplification of nature, inviting viewers to take a critical and more humble look at our place in the biosphere and the ripple effects of our actions.
As well as the work of Clément Poché, France.
FIX NATURE —
By attaching flowers to a window with tape, these interventions, both poetic and brutal, cause a visual telescoping between floral compositions, botanical plates and crime scenes. The plastic material then becomes the very subject of the images, the spectacle of the interventions. It dominates the compositions by stifling and imprisoning these hanging gardens in the middle of the chromatic and cloudy variations of the sky. The manipulation of an invisible tool such as gaffer tape used in the cultural industries of entertainment, cinema and television sees its initial use diverted: fix-hide-repair. Resistance to high temperatures, electrical insulation, non-stick, packaging of goods; the “multi-use” technical properties of adhesives reinforce the opposition between mass-produced synthetic elements and the fragility, the delicacy of plants. Repairing nature using an industrial solution like plastic is to persist in an unsuitable path. While repair is one of the main features of tape, it causes more damage here than it remedies. Rather than offering an alternative solution to those fighting the proliferation of plastic, the repairs implemented compare the traces and damage caused by human activity to a sticky and adhesive material.
LOUIS CARRÉ HOUSE, BAZOCHES SUR GUINONNE
Presents the work of Déborah Farnault, France, United States.
WITH ALL OUR MIGHT —
California, the world's fifth largest economy, is on the front lines of the
global warming. The heat waves that have been raging there for several years now
are not just temporary droughts; they are the result of desertification.
progressive of the region. At the gates of Los Angeles, the Californian desert has become the
unlikely crossroads of one of the richest agricultural regions in the United States and a
marginal economy, where poverty, crime and drugs are endemic. The region
is the scene of an imminent ecological disaster. This end-of-the-world atmosphere has not
However, this did not prevent a marginal population from settling there by choice or not, in the short term.
or in the long term. In a system that glorifies growth, productivity, performance
and positivity at all costs, we find ourselves wandering in search of belonging,
disconnected from our own humanity. Through a topographical approach, Deborah
presents images stripped of artifice: some silent interiors, tired faces
and the vastness of arid landscapes. With All Our Might addresses the notions of nostalgia,
of alienation and a romanticism that crumbles under the relentless light of the Californian desert.