(Re)thinking Ecology | The new Arcadia
How to think or rethink ecology today? While the climate and environmental emergency has been declared, the French Embassy in Beijing and the French Consulate in Shanghai are working together to build a small library of the environment, ecological transition and biodiversity as it is. intellectualized in France.
This series of texts by French intellectuals will be translated into Chinese and published on our networks before being relayed by our media partner The Paper.
The floor is given this week to Loïc Fel, doctor of philosophy from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, CEO of the influence for good agency, and co-founder of COAL.
THE NEW ARCADIA
Loïc Fel, Translated by Huang Lina
Ecology needs an imagination
At a time when humanity is facing a global and systemic crisis, both ecological and economic, social and governance, it is looking for a model for the future that reconciles the benefits of development inherited from the industrial revolution with a society fairer, more equitable and harmoniously integrated into the biosphere.
So far, alarmist speeches have tended to curb the optimism necessary for mobilization, and purely political (global COP negotiations, for example) or purely technological (development of more virtuous industrial means) approaches are disembodied, far removed from the daily life of citizens and insufficient for the necessary transformation of our lifestyles.
Indeed, with each profound change in our civilization there was an imaginary, a vision of what the world would be like afterwards. An imaginary sufficiently precise and positive for citizens to have the motivation to change and to implement the necessary efforts to achieve this change.
Today this imagination, a common construction resulting from the reflections of artists, philosophers, scientists, but also, of course, popular movements, civic and associative commitment, begin to show some broad lines such as happy sobriety in the place of consumerism, a consultative and peaceful local democracy adapted to the realities of the territories rather than a centralization and exacerbated nationalism, an integration of man and his activities in a preserved environment rather than a separation of the two universes and the exploitation of each other’s resources in a linear fashion.
But these broad outlines need to be embodied in the vision of daily life, at the level of the individual, to build a new mobilizing utopia. And this work of a common imagination is very exactly a cultural question, mobilizing the diversity of contemporary artistic expressions to produce representations or by offering the experience.
This idealistic imagination, as at various times, always keeps in filigree that of a mythical golden age, a time when everyday life would have embodied the values of equity, sober but deep happiness, inclusion in nature, etc. . A utopian imagination without any historical reality which, to have more body, has over the centuries been attached to a region, which has become its symbol: Arcadia.
The imagination of Arcadia, for lack of the risk of backwardness, could induce, offers a structure to imagine the new expected model. However, the ethereal imagination is no longer enough in the face of the finiteness of the world and the resolutely physical and concrete aspect of the challenges of humanity today. So today, utopia must be achieved by proof, be embodied in a place, be pragmatic. But doesn’t this incarnation run the risk of making each project appear as fragmented or anecdotal in relation to the issue? Comment on a global imagination of the sustainable world?
The project to imagine a future world Arcadia, while being pragmatic and concrete, is difficult to tackle as a whole. It is therefore from various points of entry, and from an individual-level perspective, that the contemporary artists involved explore this project of civilization.
An experimental method for the lived experience
To do this, these artists seem to develop a creation methodology that we find more or less in most projects. The projects concerned are not limited to the production of an object, a work, but are defined as processes. In fact, most of these artists claim to be part of the legacy of Joseph Beuys and appropriate the idea of social sculpture. These projects are implemented and adapted to a territory. They are generally participatory, eco-designed, aesthetically sober, and performative, insofar as they “do” something. Take, for example, the contemporary art course STUWA developed in the Sundgau country in the south of Alsace. Since 2015 each year 7 different municipalities among the 112 in the territory welcome an artist in residence from a project. He works with a local referent, lodges with the locals, sources his materials locally, mobilizes volunteers, and produces a project that explores one of the questions of sustainable development. For example, in 2016, the work of the new neighbors collective named Gemütlichkeit embodies this methodology well. Indeed, the artists started with the question of the building, which alone represents 23% of total CO2 emissions in France and the major part of waste production. They capitalized on the vernacular architecture of the half-timbered house by updating it to be more efficient from the point of view of sustainable development, both by integrating recycled and new local materials, sometimes unexpected like scraps of plastic instead. and place tiles, but also foreign techniques such as burning the wooden structure of the half-timbering, a Japanese technique that ensures the durability of the wood. This demonstrative work brought together around ten local businesses and it makes it possible to imagine future proposals for construction, the work of art having served as a pretext for developing and experimenting with these new techniques and new materials.
Gemütlichkeit, artistic creation of the duo Les Nouveaux Voisins, STUWA, Sundgau, Alsace, 2016
Think of a retro – future for a social project
The future that emanates from these projects has the particularity of simultaneously projecting towards the future, while rehabilitating aspects that seem to belong to the past, before the industrial revolution, and resolutely situationist, far from the idea of globalization. . It is in this sense that a new Arcadia is emerging, a form of “retro-future”, far from the usual futuristic imagination.
The artists’ projects on this sustainable future are intended to be symbolic, in accordance with the precept “think global, act local”. Indeed, the difficulty in defining a new sustainable Arcadia stems in particular from the fact that it cannot be universal in its application. What is sustainable here is not necessarily so elsewhere, depending on local resources, depending on social and cultural specificities, etc. Conceive an imaginary with principles such as those exposed in the introduction, embodied in works that respond to a local context, does not facilitate the projection of each in the future. The cycle of exhibitions “Act Global, Think local” at the European Center for Contemporary Artistic Actions in 2015 and 2016 explores precisely this contradiction between the need for a universal Arcadia, but at the same time its permanent reinterpretation here and now, everywhere … This cycle, which brought together more than twenty European artists, offered visitors the opportunity to reappropriate the world, on its own scale, to become an actor, whether in the CO2 market with Amy Balkin, a barter system around Nicolas Floc’h, or food production with the Art-Act collective, etc …
Far from the idea of globalization, this imagination must above all face a particular and new difficulty by oscillating between “low tech” and “high tech”. Indeed, the artists who imagine a post-carbon world, and therefore post-oil, gas and coal, face probable restrictions such as for transport, fossil fuel substitution technologies being slow in coming. Restrictions on mining resources and therefore certain everyday equipment, and finally contextual restrictions, depending on local resources. This is the first time that an imaginary of a better tomorrow includes a hindsight on something, and not just a development … This is why this imaginary is sometimes confusing. For example Laurent Tixador experiments this idea in a radical way with his transitory architectures. He invests alone and without any material a space, like a forest, then creates tools from the materials of the site, makes a shelter and little by little develops his level of comfort.
But at the same time, this future cannot be exempt from cutting-edge technologies which will allow us to adapt to climate change as long as they do not depend on scarce resources. Whether it is biotechnologies or nanotechnologies for example, they fill the imagination of this future, as in the paintings of Alexis Rockman and there too can distress the public.
However, it is indeed an Arcadia that takes shape with an urbanism where food production and vegetation are included, where comfort is based on ecosystem services, in a more sober but more pastoral, less frenetic and rapid society.
This, for example, was demonstrated by the exhibition Vivre (s) au Domaine de Chamarande in 2014, which brought together proposals from artists on the food of the future, combining the rediscovery of ancient tastes and varieties with modern production methods. For example, the work of the Safi collective called Glace Royale consists of producing 3 flavors of ice cream from the estate’s plant resources with a local glacier, then marketed with a bicycle-glacier designed by the artists. A symbolic experiment in the relocation of productions, this work conveys an imaginary including the notion of pleasure, an essential idea for enhancing the simpler and “pastoral” future of the new Arcadia which does not waste quality of life. This question of the quality of life and the choice of society we must make, for a new Arcadia for example, is what the HAPPY OWNERS: the unreal estate agency project explores. Happy Owners is a fictitious real estate agency that takes real estate advertisements to words by imagining a city where nature reaffirms itself, in a poetic context. Artist Soazic Guezennec, creator of the agency, imagines exuberant creations where buildings turn into waterfalls, mushrooms invade the city, and mountains fall from the sky. To make this utopia credible, the projects are described on the classic media of real estate communication: videos, brochures, plans, models and advertising posters. The projects are displayed in a professional environment, in order to create confusion with already 10 agencies open in India, one in Istanbul and soon in New York. Each agency is a space for discussion that questions the idea of nature.Visitors are invited to express their wishes and dreams for habitat, and are encouraged to become members of the community of these dream buildings.
HAPPY OWNERS: the unreal estate agency, Soazic Guezennec
Conclusion
From whatever point of view we consider the imaginary of a sustainable future, it reveals itself to be of great complexity and even a paradoxical structure that does not facilitate its capacity to attract audiences to mobilize. This is why it is time today for artists to take it beyond experimentation to offer a syncretic vision of the future. It is now probably up to the great story makers, such as novelists and filmmakers, to project us into a global vision of this future of a happy ecological transition, of a new Arcadia.
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