Heat waves, megafires and violent storms... 2022 will have been the year of awareness of theclimate emergency. In France, all these disasters have marked the spirits and awakened consciences. For the attentive contemporary art lover, the concern is not new. Carte blanche, retrospectives, collective exhibitions, festivals, conferences, plays… Since 2019, it has been difficult to ignore the ecological question: from month to month the list of events dealing with these subjects is getting longer. From the George Pompidou Center to the Cartier Foundation, from the Berlin Biennale to the Philharmonie de Paris, the ecological crisis is everywhere in the programming of cultural institutions. And if the impact of global warming is often the main motivation of the artists exhibited to seize the theme, their expression raises a flowering of questions, as pressing as they are fascinating.

Reconsidering the plant kingdom

From 2019, with " We the trees », an exhibition in homage to forest peoples, the Fondation Cartier combines the reflections of artists and researchers, in particular to challenge the idea that the tree is an inert thing. This "plant revolution" demonstrates that it is a sensitive being, capable of memory and communication. A vision that found an echo at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille (“ The Magic Forest “), at the International University Campus in Paris (“ The name of the world is forestt") or at the Centquatre, which with the exhibition " Grains told, through the works of four photographers and visual artists, the story of these "great travellers".

A pretext to question our ability to imagine tomorrow. Ignored until now, relegated to the rank of countryside decor, here is the plant kingdom finally reconsidered. The trend has taken root and continues to bear fruit with, for example, the large monograph until April 30, 2023, at the Fondation Cartier, in Paris, devoted to the painting of Fabrice Hyber, this sower of trees and flowers. ideas. Recently, the Grenoble museum received Giuseppe Penone alongside three other internationally renowned visual artists for whom the question of the relationship between humans and nature is essential. Representative of "thePoor art », the sculptor sheds light in his work on the intimate links of nature.

Last year, in an alarmist mode, " Claim the Land at the Palais de Tokyo challenged twelve artists to rethink the place of the human. In the same register, the very sonorous exhibition Musicanimale, at the Philharmonie de Paris, which has just ended, denounced, with a lot of the most lively sounds, the consequences of global warming on a sound heritage in danger. Live from our prairies, our oceans and our forests, the exhibition features the sounds of some forty species. Since the Covid-19 crisis and the successive confinements, the general public's interest in these questions has continued to branch out. All of these events contribute to this, and even open up new perspectives.

The future of life questioned by the world of culture

In 2021, Vinciane Despret was the "intellectual guest" of the Center Pompidou. The Belgian philosopher of science and psychologist, a great connoisseur of the world of birds, is one of the voices of the “new naturalism”. His white card entitled " Who are you coming with? proposed to initiate oneself to this thought through a series of conferences, shows and exhibitions. In the continuity of anthropologists like Philippe Descola and Bruno Latour, these contemporary thinkers question the place of Western man at the top of the pyramid of life. It is by becoming the chief manager of nature that humans have tipped the planet to the edge of the abyss, they tell us. And Vinciane Despret to call, with others, for an awakening of the sensitive.

To capture the fragile messages that nature sends us, artists offer ever more innovative works and performances. We were able to attend an astonishing concert between three mosquito musicians and a traditional song from India, discover thanks to the composer of electroacoustic music Bernard Fort that our hearing only perceives a small part of the songs of birds. We were finally able to understand, thanks to an ingenious installation by Gérard Hauray, that a procession of tiny plant seeds travel under our soles... By causing discrepancies with our perceptions of self-centered humans, we are invited to pay another attention to world around us. What if we reviewed our relationships with other living beings?

For Gilles Rion, head of art exhibitions at the Domaine départemental de Chamarande in Essonne, who last year devoted an entire cycle to the human/animal relationship, this is even the whole point of this artistic creation. " This way in which certain contemporary artists reconnect with animal forms without considering it as a mirror of man. The animal becomes a subject with whom we can dialogue as equals. If we allow ourselves to consider the human-animal relationship from this angle, we reconnect with anthropological theories such as those developed by the Brazilian Eduardo Viveiros de Castro who was particularly interested in animism. What happens in the artistic field when we surrender to this vision? And what are the images and representations given to us by artists of a society seen from this angle? There is something strong in this way ". And to demonstrate it in a series of events that have taken place since March 2022, and until February 12, 2023, in the spaces of the Domaine under the title " I am an animal ". The object-oriented art duo, pioneers for thirty years on this subject, strives to remove the barrier of otherness with this living being that our culture continues to build. Until submitting, in 2011, to a blood transfusion from a man on horseback: Let the horse live in me ". The video of the performance, a milestone in the history of thecontemporary art. Edi Dubien has created a delicate installation featuring drawings of children's faces accompanied by animals expressing this plural world rich in possible alliances. When the animal becomes the friend, the confidant, the companion, the partner, the double, the shadow... Not so stupid.

“La Vallée” by Fabrice Hyber, until April 30, 2023, foundationcartier.com
"Zoospheres" of Object-Oriented Art, until February 12, 2023, chamarande.essonne.fr

© Cartier Foundation