Une Clameur

Krishna May

Château de Voltaire

Krishna May is a member of the Language Creation Society. For the last decade, he has been inventing several languages. Within that context, and in order to be able to sing in every language of the world, he has trained himself to pronounce most of the signs of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

As part of the work The Call-Calculation, Krishna May, member of the Language Creation Society, who specializes in vocalizing sounds that are difficult for most humans to pronounce, does a live performance, reading out computer generated phonetic combinations. The installation The Call-Calculation is an attempt to realize Clarke’s project. At the end of May 2022, computer engineer Julien Griffit activated a blockchain calculator which began running through the possible combinations using the 150 principal characters of the IPA alphabet without memory, for an indeterminate period of time.

In 1953, Arthur C. Clarke published the novel The Nine Billion Names of God, in which Tibetan monks attempt to discover the “true name of God,” and subsequently they hire computer engineers to calculate all the possible combinations of their alphabet using a maximum sequence of nine letters. The installation The Call-Calculation is an attempt to realize Clarke’s project.

Uriel Orlow

Fort l'Ecluse

Uriel Orlow is a Swiss-born artist with a diasporic background who lives and works between Lisbon, London and Zurich. His practice is research-based, process-oriented and often in dialogue with other disciplines. Projects engage with residues of coloni­alism, spatial manifestations of memory, social and ecological justice, blind spots of representation and plants as political actors. In his series of modular works that have emerged in recent years, no­tably Theatrum Botanicum (2015-2018), Uriel Orlow addresses the role of plants as witnesses to the colonial history of Europe and climate change, but also as vehicles of remembrance.

Forest Futurism visits ancient forest eco­systems from the earth’s past, imagines future forests in the face of changing climate and considers the forest as a multi-species school, where children learn co-existence and more-than-human, non extractive ways of being.

Forest fossils not only provide a window into the distant past, allowing us to see what forests looked like millions of years ago and how trees have adapted to survive in challenging environmental conditions, including changing temper­atures or drier conditions – but they can also give as an indication of how plants might react to the current changing climate. Similarly, looking at changes in the forest canopy can be a tool for understanding forest ecosystems and predicting how they will respond to future climate stresses.

Working across film, photography, drawing, and sculpture from 3D scans of fossil, the project connects the paleon­tological deep time of tree fossils with future forest modeling to imagine more-than-human scenarios from the point of view of the forest. The main protago­nists of the central film We have already lived through the future we just can’t rememeber it are children who move through the seasons in an intimate kinship with the forest, living and learn­ing in tune with the silvestral environment and helping us imagine a different future based on more-than-human planetary co-existence.

Simon Ripoll-Hurier

Fort l'Ecluse

Simon Ripoll- Hurier graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and Rouen as well as a Masters in Arts and Politics from Sciences Po Paris. Between music and visual arts, his work is part of a practice of listening and transmission through voice. He is the co-founder of *DUUU, an online radio station dedicated to contemporary creation. His work was presented at the Museum of Fine Arts in Rouen in 2009, at the Centre Pompidou Paris in 2020 and at the Paris/Berlin International Meetings in 2021.

In 2016, artist Simon Ripoll-Hurier invited owners of “uncommon pets” to bring birds, mammals, reptiles, etc. to a makeshift shooting space installed in the Confort Moderne art center in Poitiers. The animals were then placed upon a table, filmed and their vocalizations were recorded. As a medium, the artist used a reprise of the iconic creation of the MGM (Metro Goldwyn Mayer) logo introducing all their films, in which a cameraperson and perchperson used a recording of roaring lions, played over the image of the lion featured in the MGM logo, encircled by the company motto, ars gratia artis. The Latin proverb can be translated as “art for art’s sake,” the title of Ripoll-Hurier’s work, which shows the distance created between humans and animals, as the discrepancy between the animals’ true nature and their cinematographic representation.

Salômé Guillemin and Flora Basthier

Fort l'Ecluse

Salômé Guillemin is a French designer and artist based in Geneva. Through a multidiscipli­nary practice, she creates installations, noise music performances, instruments and scenography to explore the creative potential that certain spaces and objects have to make us rethink communication and produce imaginations.

Within the diversity of human expression, certain instruments of sound transcend their conventional roles, becoming powerful symbols of collective identity and resilience. One of those instruments is the clay whistle, a humble yet forceful object that is historically used in both celebrations and protests. Beyond its simple construction and the play­ful attributes that we initially ascribe to such an object, the clay whistle is also a means of expression that lends resonance to individual and collec­tive consciousness in times of social upheaval. When a group is confronted with difficulties and crowds gather together, whistles appear as a unifying force that provide a reappropriation or an occupation of a space when words are no longer enough. At this point, whistles create a chorus of defiance, a demonstration of the collective will to endure and overcome adversity. This unassuming little object that is the whis­tle becomes a resounding incarnation of strength, a tool for upending sources that question the exercise of power through the use of sound.

Chorus de la défiance focuses on the creation of whistles with the aim of producing sounds that resonate with the natural elements of their immediate environment in order to bring people together, to occupy space and to make oneself heard. Consequently, every effort was made to avoid the use of modern technologies, such as the use of wood fired kilns (without electricity), and locally sourced clay harvested during residencies at Limoges and Bellegarde-sur-Valserine.

Pascal Rivet

Fort l'Ecluse

Born in 1966 in Quimper, Rivet lives and works in Brest. An atypical figure in French contem­porary art, he has always celebrated the dialogue between art and popular culture: after immersing himself in the world of sport, he scrutinizes the profes­sional world and its automotive icons, both urban and rural. He participated in several group shows at Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2002), Frac Languedoc-Roussillon (2008), Centre Pompidou (2011) and exhibited at the first biennale in Rennes (2008). He also did several solo shows at Passerelle, centre d’art contemporain (Brest, 2021), FRAC Bretagne (2018), Lieu Unique à Nantes (2011) and at The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain à (Paris, 2000).

For over thirty years, Pascal Rivet has used his body and his skills to create replicas and simulacra, such as repro­ductions of traditional Breton furniture, accented with motifs of American Pop Art. He uses his body as a medium to imitate major sports figures, such as football players Eric Cantona and Fabien Barthez, or cyclists, featuring himself in classic poses from the world of sports, initiating a playful dialogue between himself and the images he creates. Unfailingly poetic, he creates instinctively, first observing the world of sports, then his surroundings. His oeuvre is wide-ranging but relentlessly precise. He makes use of photos, his sculptures are tinged with a spirit of bricolage, his language veers between the spoken and the written, evoking the familiar, but always with a razor sharp preci­sion. His works are inspired by icons of modern life, and bear names that reflect this: Renault Express, Darty, Mobylette (moped) Dominos Pizza, Massey- Ferguson (tractors), New Holland, Brink’s Truck. His means of expression extends to models, painted words, pyrogravures, and films, larger than life and off-the-cuff.

For A Clamor, the artist has selected the work Dominator, a 1:1 scale replica of a Claas combine harvester, the iconic Dominator model, whose telling name evokes the vast monocultures emblem­atic of intensive industrial agriculture. This full-scale machine, entirely con­structed of painted lathes, is the result of extended studio work, meticulously executed, that creates images akin to a Potemkin village.

Max Bondu

Fort l'Ecluse et Château de Voltaire

Born in 1985, Bondu is an artist, curator and designer who lives and works in Sergy (FR). He co-directs the bermuda workshops. After studying art history and archeology in Marne-la-Vallée, he trained at the École Supérieure d’Art in Brest. Bondu’s practice is focused upon interpretation. His work uses many case studies and centers on notions of information and potential, as understood from a narrative or a projection into the future, lending it a portentous quality. A short list of his works include potential plans for the Rosen Corp. by P.K. Dick, a replica of a century-old light bulb from California, a macroscopic atlas of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, twin computers that learn chess, a list of exhaustive phonemes that echo from broadcasts to the moon, or the detailed observation of vibrations above CERN. He has taught architecture at ALICE, EPFL and co-directs a research platform on the study of clouds.

The term gargoyle is derived from the medieval Latin gargola referring to throat or gargle, due to the sound made by these architectural elements that decorate the pipes for the drainage of rainwater runoff from roofs. Often pres­ent on religious buildings, the sculpted works historically represent humans, animals and imaginary beasts. Its function meant that the figures always had gaping mouths, open throats which, when dry, lead us to speculate about the silent cry that seems to continue to emanate from them. In the sculptural series L’Appel des Goules (The Call of the Ghouls), presented in the courtyard in the front of Voltaire’s château, artist Max Bondu continues his work on the interpretation of signs and of contem­porary augurs, drawing attention to the semantic links between the Latin gula (throat) and the Arabic al-ghoûla, (ogre). This latter term lent its name to the myth of the ghoul in pre-Islamic folklore, a creature of the desert or the cemeteries whose cry lures in travelers in order to devour them, as evoked in the tales of the Arabian Nights. The ghoul is neither man nor woman, nor beast, it is an archetype of fear, sometimes evoked as a vampire or necrophage in the fantasy literature of the likes of Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Philips Lovecraft.

The sculptures are set out vertically in series, a placement in which they lose their functionality as conduits, evoking water only by its absence, and silence. Only the apparent succession of their inaudible cries, whose mounting phona­tory tension can be physically heard and felt, remains.

Maud Soudain

Fort l'Ecluse et Château de Voltaire

Born in 1988, Maud Soudain lives and works in Sergy. Graduating of Saint-Étienne and Brussels Arts Schools, she respectively founded Cuba Libre and La Dent Creuse there, both projects dedicated to production and promotion of art in urban settings. Focusing on ecological and anthropo­logical themes, Maud Soudain’s work examines the interaction between human communities and their sur­roundings within the framework of the Anthropocene. Her practice is often contextual, involving the exploration of contemporary territories and their associated issues. These elements thus borrowed from reality serve as starting points for fictional narratives.

La Colline is an installation which evolved around the hill of Mormont, located in the canton of Vaud in French-speaking Switzerland. This complex site has many layers: it is a protected natural site, an extraction site run by the Holcim Group, a key Celtic archaeological site and a first line of defense in Switzerland. In 2006, a Holcim extraction operation in a lime quarry revealed an exceptionally large Celtic site dating back to the early 1st century BCE. Archaeologists have uncovered around 250 burial pits, some as deep as five meters, in which thou­sands of remains were found, including remnants of meals and mysterious religious artifacts. The site has yielded a variety of objects as well as whole animals and human remains. It does not seem to be a habitat or a necropolis but rather a sacred religious site, akin to a sanctuary.

Artist Maud Soudain has created sculptural objects and a short fiction film and united them in an installation that uses the hill of Mormont as a prism, through which she explores contempo­rary ecological clashes, the politics of extractivism and the land. This project lends a voice to the resurgence of animist practices and questions the foundations of our society, which opposes naturalism and culture.

Mathilde Chenin

Fort l'Ecluse

In her practice, Mathilde Chénin explores the forms created by being and working together through extended and performative writing. Her work is an elaboration of different kinds of systems, immaterial and utopian architectures, genealogies, scores and other collective large objects. In 2022, she defended her thesis on the grammars of commonality, as they are composed from the close within collective spaces for living and artistic work (“Quand les artistes font forme en habitant ensemble. Usages, présences, imaginaires” - HEAD – Geneva; Urban Sociology Laboratory, EPFL Lausanne). This work has led to the publication of a book entitled Le commun par l’usage. Construire et habiter en artiste (MétisPresses, 2024).

As a continuation of her onsite practice of performance and narrative stories, artist and sociologist Mathilde Chénin weaves a narrative around water: residents who live by the water, desert crossings, the art of filtering water and drinking it, sloping roofs and rainwater catchment systems around which one can sit to listen to the rain fall.

Marie Preston

Fort l'Ecluse

Marie Preston is an artist and lecturer at Paris 8 Vincennes- Saint-Denis University (TEAMeD / AIAC Laboratory). Her oeuvre consists of research that leads to experiential works with people who, a priori, are not artists. In recent years, she has focused on practices related to making bread (Pain Commun, Four Commun and Levain), on alternative schools and libertarian and institutional teaching (Maison Imprimerie, Quilt des Ecoles, Impressions Libertaires), and women’s work in the fields of caregiving and early childhood (Un Compodium) She also undertakes participatory research, bringing together microbiologists, peasant bakers, artisans and trainers, for an in-depth exploration of natural yeasts supported by the CO3 system, notably at bermuda in 2022.

CO3 Levain is a participative research project that brings together microbiol­ogists, artisans, bakers, rural bread makers, trainers and artists. Its objective is to provide knowledge about the prac­tices of baking bread with yeast. Preston is interested in the microbial activity in the bakery, around the ovens, and studies the effect of local environments upon yeast biodiversity.

Louise Hervé & Clovis Maillet

Château de Voltaire

Born in 1981, Louise Hervé & Clovis Maillet work as a duo. They live and work in Paris and Geneva. In 2001, they founded the International Institute for Important Items (I.I.I.I) for which they create performances, installations and genre films which feature original characters: a group of retirees whose sole objective is eternal life (Un Passage d’Eau, 2014), or a young man with a trag­ic destiny who dies after being attacked by wallpaper (The New Bleeding Wall, 2012). Hervé & Maillet wear many hats: speakers, academics, scientists, trans­mitting non-hierarchical knowledge that wavers between erudition and humor, and exploring the possibilities of oral transmission.

Spectacles Sans Objet is a multimedia installation. It is meant as an historical re­constitution of past artistic and political experiments related to performance. It is rare to examine performance art from this genealogical perspective. At first glance, it would seem to be a recent art form, ephemeral, one that often involves the body, counter to the production of objects. The artists selected three key moments, from the 17th to 19th centu­ries, in which performance and Utopian concepts converge with daily life.

Consequently we discover festivals and spectacles celebrating heroes and revolutionary ideals as created by painter Jacques Louis David (1748-1825), the movement referred to as the Secte des Méditateurs et des Dormeuses (akin to the Primitives, and Art Naif), and the daily industrialist mise en scènes of the progressive Saint Simon commu­nity, founded in Ménilmontant in 1830. This immersive installation unfolds as a projection accompanied by different ob­jects from the project. Some are present in the films, others were created for the exhibition.

Lou Masduraud

Château de Voltaire

Born in 1990 in Montpellier, Lou Masduraud lives and works in Geneva. She graduated from HEAD – Geneva. In her work, she analyz­es, modifies and stages normative collective habits, revealing the relationships of power and desire that underlie them. Combining sculpture and installation in a formal vocabulary that borrows from the grotesque as well as the poetic, the artist creates phantasmagorical worlds with strange realities and offers the ex­perience of this transfiguration of every­day life as a first form of emancipation.

Lou Masduraud uses her sculptural works to explore illusions and the analogies of nature and mythology. She sculpts the body in a sensual manner, using fragments, hands, breasts, ears and mouths to form her works, to wit, fountains. With Anxiolitic Fountain (Tranquilizer Fountain), the artist evokes the question of our relationship with anxiety and depression. The fountain disperses a calming, antidepressive mist into the exhibition space, with a diffuser dispersing an infusion of St. John’s Wort, a flowering plant of the Hypericaceae family, known for its therapeutic prop­erties. It is notably used as a natural antidepressant, to treat neuralgias, mood disorders, insomnia and anxiety. Masduraud invokes the social function of public fountains, playing with their natural calming effects in order to draw attention to a certain contemporary malaise.

LB plantes

Fort l'Ecluse

After studying art history in Strasbourg then at the Sorbonne-University of Paris 4, Léa Bosshard trained in the management of cultural projects at the Institute of European Studies and continued re­search studies in dance at the University of Paris 8, working on the links between dance and museums, as well as on the poetics of choreographic retrospec­tives. Since 2021, having returned to settle in the region of Arbois (Jura), she founded LB Plants aims to encourage and facilitate the use of plant-based preparations on farms and estates in order to rejuvenate the soil and promote healthy crops. Its products are produced in the Jura, from harvest to packaging.

The installation shows a variety of preparations created by Léa Bosshard. Most of these preparations are made from plants gathered by Léa in the surrounding area of Arbois in the Jura mountains. A variety of procedures (decoction, fermentation, etc.) enable her to transform plants using rainwater infused with plant extracts, transforming them into products that can be used to treat all plants. The labels that provide details about the plants and processes used were designed by Léa’s sister, graphic designer Ariane Bosshard. They opted for a minimum of visual identity, verging on the industrial, in order to defuse an imagery that is sometimes too “esoteric” when it comes to slurries and other natural preparations and plant extracts used in agriculture that are classified by the French government as “PNPP, Préparations Naturelles Peu Préoccupants” (Natural preparations that are of low concern).

The installation is to be viewed within the context of ready-made art, also resonating with some works of Pop Art (for example Andy Warhol’s iconic Brillo Box). Despite that, the patient, artisanal production of Léa’s preparations upends these references, which are often linked to an industrial economy, or seen as effigies of the capitalist world, instead bringing to the fore the practice of healing with plants.

Jean-Xavier Renaud

Fort l'Ecluse et Château de Voltaire

Born in Metz in 1977, Renaud lives and works in Hauteville-Lompnes in Ain and teaches drawing at HEAD — Geneva. In 2005 he exhibited at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg. In 2008 his work was presented at the Kunstmuseum in Bonn. In 2010 he participated in the Dynasty exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and at the Palais de Tokyo. The same year he was invited to the Visions contemporaines exhibition by Margaret of Austria at the Royal Monastery of Brou. In 2019 he exhibited at the Salomon Foundation and at the Anne Barrault gallery for the exhibition Topor n’est pas mort_. In 2020 he installed the monumental canvas “Hauteville-Texas” for the exhibition Comme un parfum d’aventure _at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon. His works are present in numerous private and public collections in Switzerland and throughout Europe.

Jean-Xavier Renaud’s oils, watercolors and digital paintings depict the social and cultural questions that concern the artist. They are the means he uses to summon the environment in which he is evolving, as well as the global issues as narrated by the media: sexuality, poverty, death, ecology, transcendence, the economy, modern-day slavery... Words cry out, shapes scream, colors explode. The artist’s well honed critical gaze makes him a sharp chronicler of the modern world, as he rejects social me­dia and the cult of celebrity it has bred. As a tribute to the sardonic wit for which Voltaire was renowned, the series of paintings in the exhibition is introduced with a large full-size portrait of the Sun King, Louis XIV, who seems to be on the point of addressing the visitors. It is fol­lowed by a series whose theme is large­ly animal, in which different personalities are depicted with animals which all were clearly killed in hunts. As for Agneaux (Lambs), they have just stepped out of a plastic container, while two pigs drive a Porsche. Finally, Zautrul, the final piece in the series, is an homage to the artist’s dog, who died in 2018.

Guillaume Robert

Fort l'Ecluse et Château de Voltaire

Born in 1975 in Nantes, Robert holds degrees from the Brest School of Art and the University of Rennes I (Philosophy). He lives and works in Sergy (01) and is Co-Director of the bermuda ateliers. He uses film and video to create composite dramatizations with open narratives, focusing on gestures, practices, modes of action, transfor­mation, and presence with attention to the landscape. The filmic events in his oeuvre meld documentary narrative with dreamlike shifts, hovering between humanist fable and magical realism. As each film unfolds, a descriptive odyssey of the Mediterranean takes shape. Using agricultural or natural settings, he stages bodies, sounds, history, and work, weaving them into reflective and poetic experiences that appeal to the senses. In 2019, the International Center for Art and Landscape of Vassivière Island invited him to propose an exhibition for the Aldo Rossi building called Nos Yeux Vivants (Our Living Eyes).

Félicien Goguey

Fort l'Ecluse

Félicien Goguey is an artist and interaction designer who lives and works in Geneva. He creates interactive installations, performances, applications and connected objects. He explores the creative potential of programming languages and new tech­nologies, favoring free tools. He is mainly interested in the factors that contribute to the imperceptibility of telecommuni­cations networks and other phenomena invisible to the user, as well as their political and social effects.

The sound work 25 kV AC was created especially for this exhibition. It is an homage to the historical role played by the Fort as a strategic point of passage, exploring the electromagnetic activity of the trains that run below it, as well as their passengers. The composition was entirely created using audio recordings of the electromagnetic fields generated by the railway electrical installations, the train equipment and the technical objects used by travelers on the Geneva-Bellegarde line. The electromag­netic activity generated by the railway network and its users is transposed into the acoustic spectrum and becomes audible, with the appearance of a con­temporary reminiscence that resonates with the murmurs of this key point of passage, which was once inevitable. The work 25 kV AC also explores the sonic potential of electromagnetic waves which create an environment that is dominated by the 50Hz of the railway electrification system. This produces a multitude of punctual, repetitive and cyclical events that combine to create a plethora of motifs, textures and layers. Its transmission in the blockhouse invites the listener to reflect on the timeless links that echo throughout our shared history. It enables visitors to appreciate the evolution of the fort, from a sentinel of geopolitical borders to a living witness of cultural, historic and socio-technological narratives from a Hertzian perspective, one that is usually imperceptible to our ears.

FAIRE argile

Fort l'Ecluse

FAIRE argile is a collective of professional potters whose practice follows that of ancient potters who lived and created collectively. FAIRE argile seeks to create practical objects that fill the needs of the moment, as well as speak to the future. The collec­tive invites us to rethink our lifestyles and create sustainable alternatives.

The bermuda ateliers invited the FAIRE argile collective to propose a workshop for the creation of irrigation jars (ollas) for the Biennale Insulaire des Espaces d’Art de Genève (BIG), which took place in July 2023 in the Perle du Lac park in Geneva. This is an ancient form of irrigation, in which terracotta jars are buried in the soil and filled with water. Thanks to the porosity of the terracotta, the water is released naturally as required deep into the soil, providing ideal amounts of water for plants and trees. This method helps increase a plant’s ability to resist the variations due to climate change.

The terracotta jars were created collectively by members of the bermuda ateliers, along with children and adults who participated in the ten-day workshop at BIG, supervised by potter Mariane Frisch, a cofounder of FAIRE argile. This collective is made up of six professional women potters who see clay as a “Material to Defend”. With the slogan, “Less Plastics, More Ceramics,” the collective takes an active role in defending clay as a material with­in an ecological context, and a means of fighting industrial overproduction. The jars will be placed on agricultural land in November 2024, next to the bermuda ateliers in Sergy, and will serve to irrigate land allotted for the implantation of a forested wilderness area.

Dominique Petitgand

Fort l'Ecluse et Château de Voltaire

Dominique Petitgand was born in 1965 in Laxou, he lives and works in Paris. Since 1992, he creates sound works, where voices, noises, musical atmospheres and silences construct, micro-universes where ambiguity permanently subsists between a principle of reality and a pro­jection in a possible fiction, out of con­text and timeless. He displays his works during exhibitions, in the form of a sound installation in which the sound diffusion device, adapted both to the particularity of the spaces involved and to the story itself, offers a plural and open experience. He also presents his pieces on records and in books, on the radio, on­line and during listening sessions-sound performances in performance halls and outdoors.

This work acts as a sort of audio honor guard that accompanies each visitor entering the fort. Located on the slope leading to the drawbridge and the entrance, the installation makes use of the onsite sound system, generally used for sound and light shows, playing with the disproportion between the massive scale of the sound system in place and the close proximity of the recordings that are broadcasted.

Six giant speakers and four woofers, placed along the path, transmit a long series of spoken and musical sequences that play in a continuous loop. The “vocal chords” call to mind a collective of voices of a wide range of ages and genders. Short phrases are at first restrained, then slowly unfold into a crescendo. Sometimes mini-narratives emerge, carried along on a few musical elements. The voices form a threshold, a screen that welcomes you, then sees you off when you leave the fort.

Delphine Reist

Château de Voltaire

Delphine Reist was born in 1970 in Sion (Switzerland), she lives and works in Geneva. She regu­larly collaborates with the visual artist Laurent Faulon. Winner of the Swiss Art Award in 2008 and the Irène Reymond Foundation Prize, she taught at ENSBA in Lyon and currently teaches at HEAD – Geneva. She has shown her work in several exhibitions internationally at the Tinguely Museum (Basel, 2023), the FRAC Grand Large (Dunkirk, 2022), the Pasquart Art Center (Bienne, 2017), MAMCO (2013); the Dallas Biennale (2012), Fri Art (2009) and Tour (2008). Her work is present in the collections of the Pompidou in Paris; at the FRAC Rhône- Alpes; the FRAC Grand Large; FRAC Occitanie and FRAC Limousin in France; at MAMCO; at the Art Museum and FCAC in Valais; Kunstmuseum Soloturn, FCAC and FMAC Geneva in Switzerland. Her work is represented by Galerie Lange+Pult in Geneva and Zurich and Laurent Godin in Paris.

Reist often incorporates industrial ob­jects and machines in her oeuvre. These repurposed objects acquire a form of autonomy, moving, turning, exploding. They become sculptures, overflowing and agitated. Instead of the usual tools, here she makes use of used coats, gloves, scarves in real fur that the artist has salvaged in order to make prints. The furs are fixed and passed in a press using a monotype process. The paper is imprinted with an impression, and each print is unique. While this printing process was invented in the 17th century, Reist radically updates it and uses a steamroller for the pressing. This 4.5 ton machine, usually used for major con­struction, crushes the objects and, while one might expect that its sheer weight would obliterate everything, in fact the imprints come out in intense detail, with each hair intact. Hovering somewhere between pictorial abstraction and brush­strokes, this series evokes the appropri­ation of the animal by man, and stands as a representation of luxury..

Célia Picard & Hannes Schreckensberger

The Franco/ Austrian duo Célia Picard and Hannes Schreckensberger, born in 1978 and 1982 respectively, lives and works in Montpellier. In their sculptural and installation work, they succeed in articulating questions linked to the field of architecture, from which they both

come through their training, to those of contemporary art. Nourished by a subtle association of references to modernism and its utopias, as well as to vernacular forms of craftsmanship (from here and elsewhere) and to the fertile technol­ogy of digital art, their works invite us to reflect on the uses and rituals uses and rituals woven into the context of our lives, and the objects that surround us. Their explorations span collective mythologies, both in the domestic space and urban or rural contexts.

L’Atelier Paysan

L’Atelier Paysan is a cooperative (SCIC SA) which supports farmers in the design and manufacture of machines and buildings adapted to peasant agroecology. Their objective is to regain technical sovereignty and autonomy on a collective level by raising awareness about technical issues concerning farming tools, thus regaining technical sovereignty and autonomy through the reappropriation of knowl­edge and know-how.

A member of l’Atelier Paysan will talk about the challenges faced by the cooperative from a farmer’s point of viey. The POLMA research-action project will also be discussed, which brings together farmers and sociologists who are collectively interested in the role of agricultural machinery in social science research.