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ALCHEMY

ALCHEMY

From June 28 to October 28, 2023

Exhibition taken from the book “Charbonniers!” Alchemy between art, memory and environment” from the Culture Ailleurs collective (Ed. Terre Vivante)

This exhibition inaugurates the transversal residency around art and agronomy, carried out between the Culture Ailleurs collective and the Domaine des Hautes Glaces. This collaboration aims to open our eyes to vegetable charcoal, this ancestral craft at the heart of the territories and yet little known, and to question our use to reduce our impacts. For 3 years, experiments combining research and creation around vegetable charcoal will be implemented at the estate.

Artists: Fabienne BALLANDRAS, Emmanuel BRETEAU, Kristof GUEZ, Sébastien PERROUD, Julien LOBBEDEZ, Yannick SIEGEL

Alchemy: “All life, including our own flesh, is a chemistry composed of reduced carbon elements, that is, carbon atoms surrounded by hydrogen atoms. »

Definition taken from the book Microcosmos by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan

You just have to look at the world on the scale of micro-organisms to see it differently and discover that carbon atoms “are in continual agitation: they interact, they evolve, in connection with many other elements such as hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur. These five elements constitute the common denominator of all life and represent 99% of the dry weight of all living beings. […] The flexibility of carbon is one of the secrets of life on Earth.”
Artists' interest in carbon comes from this very dynamic character: it attaches, binds, collaborates. It is always transforming. “Carbon is first of all light which encounters the plant. It passes through several states, gas, water, mineral, before becoming a fossil to be transformed, among other things, thanks to human action, into vegetable charcoal […]. Coal is a gasoline.”

To charcoal is to take the mineral from the plant.
This transformation of the material by the artists reveals to us that we must broaden our imagination of carbon while reducing our balance sheet. How to decarbonize society using coal? What does this artistic gesture teach us? What does this transversal residency between peasant agronomists and artists teach us? With coal, there is no longer a past, present and future. On the contrary: what existed is modern.

Excerpt from the preface to the book Charbonnier written by Vincent Sorrel

This cross-disciplinary residency will invite several readings around art and agronomy. Art is indeed a universe of original, innovative and sometimes complex creations but Culture Ailleurs and
the Domaine des Hautes Glaces will explore all the alchemy of their professions and know-how.