Grands Travaux Urbains, 2020
In this body of work, I seek to explore the urban textures and narratives of our contemporary societies through botany, industrial waste, landscape and urban design, temporary construction structures and sites.
As a sort of an amateur urban naturalist, I started to collect and press weeds found at the edges of construction sites, making herbariums of this overlooked diversity, which suggests and illustrates the movements that have taken place within the soil, bringing this global vegetal presence to the streets. Because, surprisingly, cities with all their weeds can host more diversity than the countryside, which, in Europe, has very often been devoted to monocultures. Many weeds grow in the wastelands, “ the third landscape ”, in-between spaces, and building sites, where disturbing the earth actually helps their spreading. The activity of construction can reactivate seeds dormant for decades. The turned-over ground creating a temporary wasteland contributes actively to the presence and spreading of weeds within the city. I always felt attracted by construction sites, most probably because my father, a contractor specialising in road signage, occasionally took me to the sites he was working on. I took an early interest in how things were made and who made them. Looking at the construction sites as sites of investigation, I started to repurpose some of their signage tools. Those structures that warn and stop passers-by have a ghostly presence in the city, as seen but not looked at. I started to appreciate their inner design qualities as well as all the layers of meaning they hold, which speak to me of manual labour, practical knowledge, temporary architectures and social classes.
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Collected and dried, the weeds were displayed and frozen in epoxy slabs which are themselves inserted into the metal structures, acting both as warning tools and standing frames. Indutrial resin mimics and accelerates the process of natural tree resin fossilisation into amber. A fossil is frozen time. Its temporality and rarity make it valuable. These modern fossils are preserved as in a natural history museum, which organises beings and transforms them into specimens, artefacts. They also look like an old ladies’ herbarium, a practice falling within the genre of creative crafts. But mainly, they rest in a shiny coffin because to collect and preserve, we often kill and archive death. The metal structures hold mini resting landscapes or panoramas in a sort of flattened perspective that renders vertical landscapes.
Anne-Laure Franchette, “Plants are not Bricks”, Mobile Soils, TETI Press, 2021, Zürich, CH
Conceived jointly by Basel-based curator Elise Lammer and La Becque, Modern Nature: An Homage to Derek Jarman is a three-year project which comprises the development of a garden and an artistic programme inspired by the life and work of British filmmaker, activist, artist and activist Derek Jarman (1942-1994). Created especially for Modern Nature, the garden located on the lakeside grounds of La Becque is a tribute to the garden Jarman developed around his seaside cottage in Dungeness, on the southern coast of Kent during the eight years preceding his death from AIDS-related illness. Far from a perfect copy, La Becque’s Jarman-inspired garden is actually a reinterpretation of the principles that guided him throughout his gardening process, i.e. working with local and native species, creating scenography based on found elements, devising efficient biodynamic arrangements and avoiding walls or fences.
Pictures (c) La Becque, Manon Briod, Julien Gremaud, Diana Martin