13th edition of the Saint- Étienne International Design Biennial, “Resource(s), Foreseeing the future”

The exhbition “Nos pieds d'argile, (Our Feet of Clay)”  takes place in Saint Pierre Church by Le Corbusier, and is laid out in walled- off spaces surrounded by a common encircling set of stepped levels running continuously around all the rooms. An unusual arrangement, inviting

I exhibit this design schema today to show and share the hypotheses of reconfiguration on which I am working, inviting us to advance together as critics on a common path.
We have become aware of our fragility; now we must seek out a pragmatic habitability and terrains where we can learn to love this transformed, damaged world.

An exhibition in three stages (with three projects in each) to analyze, narrate, and change our practices:

_we repair the terrain (of commonality) with:
an introduction to another type of stepping stone, the stepwell in India, to remind us that water is a common good.
a structure/space that invites us to come together to ask the right questions. And an installation outside the exhibition space to activate a collective air- drying site with the students of HEAD Geneva.

_we reinhabit the terrain with three productions to anchor ourselves by reviewing our attachments, summoning up situated stories, and revealing a territory.

_we prepare the terrain with a full-scale demonstration of a pragmatic residence, conceived to interact with its environment and give back to the earth.
Finally, the project presents two fantasies, two works that extend reality to better escape it, with unexpected associations to recover a certain lightness of spirit.

Another way of projecting ourselves.

The exhibition proposes a specific space-time: thinking of the past as beneath us, rather than behind us. As David Abram suggests: “The past, far from being that which recedes as we move forward in the world, would be the very ground on which we progress - composed as it is of the archive of the living and their bodies (branches, leaves, roots, skeletons, alluvium...) deposited, layer after layer, and thus constituting the humus on which we walk”.

An exhibition to let your terrain affect you and where we can learn to love this transformed, damaged world.