Maryvonne Arnaud, Alain Quercia and Philippe Mouillon will be in research and creation residency at the invitation of Jun Yano President of the ZUTTOSOKO Art Center, located in the province of Fukoshima in order to Question and represent soils.

Most European languages ​​retain in their structures the imprint of words of Latin origin, as many clues to ancient interpretations of the world. If these interpretations have been preserved in Western grammars over the centuries, it is obviously because they always remain active, bringing us a useful consistency to our daily perceptions and representations. This is the case for example of the word Humus, which designates the surface layer of the soil, resulting from the decomposition of organic matter, by the combined action of invertebrate animals, bacteria, fungi and by the alternation of climatic cycles. Humus designates living, fertile soils. Now the etymology of this word is common with the words Humanity, Human, Humility, which symbolically means that the soil constitutes our nourishing soil, but that it also forms the matrix of humanity, our common fund without which we cannot deploy our lives, socialize and humanize ourselves.

But this maintenance of the soils and this careful transmission from one generation to the next seems broken today. The shameless exploitation of soils and their widespread mistreatment, obviously reaches a peak in Fukushima, but it is emblematic of a suicidal, amnesiac or distracted global system, which causes the collapse of the ecosystem balances necessary for the preservation of humanity and threatens the habitability of the terrestrial. Living lands become rarer and more precious every day.

Questioning and representing soils will be our common method of approach to question and reframe our lives, to situate them in their right measure in the long time of humanization and in the tangled dynamics of the living. But our approaches will be divergent and will play at surprising each other, complementing or intertwining each other.

• multitudes – philosophical artistic political review, publishes this spring 2022 its number 86 entitled The territory, a political affair
• Territory! The word flaps like a flag, it is adored or suspected. What about this political object? This issue attempts to objectify it, to extract it from categorisations to show its diversity, its interdependencies, its historical depth, its resources. “The spirit of the place” inspires the artist, defines the environments to be preserved, permeates our affects. We all experience “the appalling sweetness of belonging”.
• In response to this invitation, Philippe Mouillon develops in this issue the idea that the work of the place is simply the work of a smuggler who facilitates resurgences of time and their social acclimatization:

“The poet, the artist, the gardener or the architect (and so many others, inhabited by deep times) can work on a place by carefully assembling a certain quality of air, lights, prevailing winds, by dosing the mineralities, by synchronizing the encounter between individuals, an era, temporalities and the entanglement of terrestrial ecosystems… in order to crystallize a mood, an impalpable atmosphere, a particular intensity that carries us and invites us to live.

From one site to another, but also from one era to another of human societies, from one stage to another of our own existence, places form the matrix of our sensitivity and our behavior. They are places rather than nothing in that they soothe us, console us, consolidate us, bring us together, connect us, grow us. They are part of a break with the simplified uniform of territorial abstraction to open in us a decanted present of the moment, where presences and absences remain, endlessly intertwined”. 

• For more information: www.multitudes.net