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.