[Winter 2024]

By Jacques Doyon

Cities are born from clusters of structures that provide shelter for human life and activities. Through them flow grids of thoroughfares that form patterns of movement and exchange. That’s what an urban agglomeration is: a dense knot, large or small, placed at a certain point in a rhizomatic lattice that runs through an entire territory. It is this territory that the artists in this issue’s thematic section explore: they travel through the city, its peripheries, and backcountries to take the measure of how human beings inscribe their urbanness in and transform the natural world. Whether by rediscovering the singularities of certain regions, strolling in the street, eyes to the ground, looking for weeds and flowers that resist the paving over of the land or driving along the highway networks that draw the map of peri-urban zones, they point out the richness and contradictions of how we form our agglomerations.

Éric Tabuchi and Nelly Monnier undertook to “photographically” inventory the buildings and landscapes characteristic of some 450 “natural regions” of France, a monumental adventure aimed at offering a renewed view of the country. The first four volumes of Atlas des Régions Naturelles (ARN) have already been published, out of a total of about thirty. Tabuchi and Monnier also explore the conditions for presentation of their images by making thematic connections among the regions or sometimes by strengthening their photographs’ links to local artefacts. Four of these exhibitions – in particular, Soleil Gris, on display at the Rencontres d’Arles in summer 2023 – are explored here.

Upon invitation by the city of Bordeaux, Suzanne Lafont spent a long time travelling around the city before focusing on the wild plants emerging from interstices in streets and side-walks. For the first part of her exhibition, she composed a sort of photographic herbarium, creating a non-scientific taxonomy and turning, rather, to the narrative (novelistic) dimension of street names. In the second part, the colours of the images were inverted and placed on a black background, making them look irradiated. Premonition? Anticipation? Lafont reminds us that the city is inscribed in a broader natural territory whose history we must know and whose future must be taken into account.

Bertrand Carrière regularly drives around a large area on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River circumscribed by highways 10, 20, and 55. He has built a sort of visual diary showing the diversity of structures, empty lots, people, and activities found along these major routes that structure cities’ landscapes. Some of his images are displayed on billboards alongside these very highways, with the words “À qui appartient le paysage?” (Who owns the landscape?) emblazoned on them – a way of questioning the status of the territory, with its beauty, ugliness, and tensions inherent to its development. Translated by Käthe Roth

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS ]
[ Complete article, in digital version, available here: Rhizomes, Atlases, and Herbaria ]