Research-creation: Selfood/Sugar Killer
Developed by artist Thierry Boutonnier, researchers Julie Le Gall, Olivier Hamant, Adrien Baysse-Lainé, teams from the MARGUERITE program, and fifteen colleges mainly in Vaulx-en-Velin, research-creation Selfood / Sugar Killer explores the challenges of sustainable food in the Lyon metropolitan area. This research was initiated and is piloted by COAL and LADYSS within the framework of the second edition of our Laboratory of sustainable culture La Table et le Territoire. Happy winner of a residency at the ThalieLab in Brussels and of support from the FNAGP, after having benefited in 2017 from the support of the Carasso Foundation, Thierry Boutonnier and the whole team set out to organize several meetings around of this project.
Within the framework of the Sustainable Culture Laboratory # 2 La Table et le Territoire, the artist Thierry Boutonnier in close collaboration with Julie Le Gall (teacher-researcher in geography, ENS de Lyon, Environmental Laboratory City Society) and in connection with the researchers Olivier Hamant (INRA), and Adrien Baysse-Lainé (Lyon 2 / INRA), launched the Selfood / Sugar killer project, a collective exploration of the food cycle of a territory (from production to consumption) by questioning on the differences between the perceived (cultural) value, the displayed value (economic), the social value and the ecological value of food, for cultivated and manufactured products and consumed products.
The food question has, to a large extent, designed and structured our territories via local food production methods, the question of terroir and vernacular cultures. The challenges of food, at the scale of a territory brings together residents, local communities, associations and private actors who exchange, and build a culture, eating behaviour that becomes not only a material key to their impact on the territory, but also a symbolic and powerful way of acting.
In this sense, studying the cultural representation of our food is essential. Today it shows a gap between a gastronomic culture of “terroir” and a reality of food production disconnected from the territory; a diet of “pleasure” too meaty, too rich, generating waste that takes into account neither the food cycles nor the current needs of a more sedentary, aging population living in a world more constrained in resources; an inadequacy of our practices with future climate change which will reshuffle the cards of agricultural productions. There is also a great disparity in access to quality food circuits, “proximity food desert”, a cultural or geographical break between “disadvantaged” urban areas and agricultural areas.
From this geo-socio-political approach, the Selfood / Sugar killer project starts from the idea that sustainable food is linked to awareness of the value of food. To better understand how our food landscapes are developed and what constitutes them, Thierry Boutonnier and Julie Legall have devised a protocol to make the mapping of our food landscapes more visible in order to help transform them.
Based on the creation of a catalog of hundreds of selfoods, self-portraits of their daily consumption made by schoolchildren (developed by the MARGUERITE program, an action research project which aims to critically sensitize adolescents to the problems of sustainable agriculture and food piloted by Julie Legall), Thierry Boutonnier develops the representation of our mental maps of food places, and the story of the nutritional, symbolic and economic value that we attribute to food, compared to their real values. He is also interested in the study of the land value of market gardeners’ land, compared to the value of what they produce in connection with the research of Adrien Baysse-Lainé.
Between self-portrait and mental representation of the bundle of relationships that unites us to the environment, the project wants to make visible the physical continuity that links our bodies and our environments through the flow of food, by rewriting a certain history of art, portraits and landscapes.
The objective is to achieve a final restitution of the project in an exhibition dedicated to food. The staging of this complex network of interactions will give rise to a set of plastic achievements relating to the values of food (photos, maps, videos and performance in public space) as well as the invention of a protocol of planting “what would you like to sow today” and transactional objects likely to change these representations.
Expérience : Arrosage de graine au Soda VS Arrosage arrosage de graine à l’eau
The project team
Thierry Boutonnier was born in 1980. He lives and works in Lyon. He is developing work around the concept of domestication. Active and reactive artist, Thierry Boutonnier deploys a wide range of individual behaviors in reaction to the so-called modern system. It envisages the artistic act with the same requirements for information, know-how, identification of objectives, operational research, decision-making imperatives and concentration of resources as any project management activity. Claiming to be non-specialist, versatile and multidisciplinary, he uses all the means at his disposal: performance, videos, sculptures, images and photographs, diagrams, publications … He develops in particular a work around the artistic representation of entomophagy, starting from the observation that in France and in these so-called developed states, we practice a catastrophic agro-industry for employment, hygiene and the environment. He thus experiences entomophagy by placing it at the heart of collective kitchens in places of transmission of knowledge: colleges, high schools, universities …
Website : www.domestication.eu
Adrien Baysse-Lainé is a contractual doctoral student and lecturer in geography, at the Lumière Lyon 2 University and at the INRA in Montpellier. Under the supervision of Claire Delfosse and Coline Perrin, he is preparing a thesis on the construction of the land base for local food farming in France. In particular, it studies in detail approaches based on alternatives to individual private property – carried by public actors (inter-municipal authorities) and civil society (Terre de Liens movement) – which promote food relocation. His research is carried out in three territories, in a comparative approach: the South-Aveyron, the Amiens and the Lyonnais; for the latter, he is associated with the PSDR 4 action research program “Frugal” (Urban forms and food governance).
Olivier Hamant is a researcher in plant biology whose main objective is to understand how plants use the forces generated during growth, along with other biochemical signals (like hormones), to channel their own development and their forms. To do this, he uses an interdisciplinary approach that combines cell biology, physics and modeling. This project is currently funded by the European Research Council, with the aim of identifying the role of mechanical signals in the definition of plant forms. He obtained his doctorate at Versailles (France) in plant cell biology and carried out postdoctoral stays in Ghent (Belgium) and Berkeley (USA). Olivier also collaborates with the Michel Serres Institute on the central theme of the Anthropocene.
Julie Le Gall is a lecturer in geography at the ENS de Lyon and member of Environment, City, Society. Her thesis focused on the conservation of local spaces to feed metropolises through the study of Buenos Aires. Julie Le Gal centers her research on spatial recompositions and development, integrating the questions of peri-urban and peasant agriculture, the relations between town and countryside, neighboring migrations, the challenges of local development, or even pressures – such as climate change – affecting agricultural resources.
The MARGUERITE project is a Teaching-Research project that aims to make the link between agriculture and food. It is carried by the ACCES team of the French Institute of Education (Ifé), the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (ENS de Lyon) thanks to the Joint Research Unit (UMR) Environment City and Society (EVS ).
More information at: grainesdexplorateurs.ens-lyon.fr
The partners
The Sustainable Culture Laboratory is supported by the Ministry of Ecological and Inclusive Transition, within the framework of the National Climate Change Adaptation Plan, the Ministry of Culture, the Creative Europe program of the European Union, the Imagine2020 network. and the Carasso Foundation, the FNAGP and the Thalie Foundation. It also involves many cultural partners and research institutes: LADYSS, ENS Paris, ENS Lyon and INRA.
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