Inclusive Intelligence

D’Alembert: ‘d very much like you to tell me what difference there is, according to you, between a man a statue, between marble and flesh.

Diderot: Not a great deal. Flesh can be made into marble, and marble into flesh.The epigraphs come from Denis Diderot’s D’Alembert’s Dream (1769), trans. Derek Coltman (1966)

You write on the subject of what is referred to as contemporary art. But what are artists contemporaries of? You never discuss this point.

Contemporary of that which changes. Artists are contemporaries of what emerges from their time: nowadays, of the epidemic, at a time when the smallest of all living beings is causing upheaval among the most massive institutions; of promiscuity, as the climate crisis is alarmingly bringing beings and phenomena closer together; of the forest fires in the Amazon and Australia, symbols of the mass destruction of species; and finally, contemporaries of the disposable image, recyclable objects, the commodification of raw materials, and a world that is processed into products. But it seems to me that the true agent of contemporary history is the molecule, from viruses to particles of tear gas and glyphosate.

The Artist is Immersed.

As an architect, my work generally results in something durable and constructive whereas artists, whom you’re involved with, observe, critique, analyze? Their works, which aren’t even always finished products, seem to be doing little more than duplicating the world.

What the Anthropocene teaches us is that we have to cease imagining ourselves towering over a world that we would be at liberty to observe, as if separated from it by a glass wall. In other words, that we must bring the critical posture to an end. We are on board the Planet Earth vessel, and immersed in a milieu that is now no longer an environment, but rather an echo chamber. As film director Jacques Tati put it in his comedy My Uncle, “everything communicates.” On a more serious note, and owing to the fact that we now perceive ourselves as being included in the mass of the biosphere, we are currently witnessing a decline in binary thinking, the very dualism that has structured Western thought for over two thousand years with the earth–sky, nature–culture, man–woman, subject–object, form–matter, active–passive, and civilization–savages divides, and the list goes on. Taking responsibility for this state of affairs, and trying to overcome dualism is what I call inclusive thinking. And an inclusive art expresses the immersed position of artists within reality, a reality with no known outside, in which we are entangled. We had imagined the world as if oxygen was neutral and empty, as a mere backdrop; we now find ourselves with a need for “mental gills,” to better evolve, immersed in a purely material atmosphere.

If we are now immersed, included in a world whose elements cannot be separated, what is to become of art? And how could it help us overcome the environmental crisis?

In anthropological terms, the whole human production is ordered along two polar extremes, with artworks on one side, and waste on the other. The former is viewed as the epitome of luxury, the unnecessary, and the superfluous. As an architect, you file it away under the “percent for art.” But when Georges Bataille counts the arts as examples of “unproductive expenditure” in his essay on the “general economy,” The Accursed Share, it wasn’t to belittle the arts, on the contrary, given that such things as eroticism, luxury, war, and feasts and celebrations all fall under this category. And these activities cannot be described as “non-essential”, to use modern terminology. Waste is the very opposite of this, and both are in league together. It is actually in this connection that lies the very interest of pondering the current crisis from the starting point of artistic activity.

Contrary to artworks, by definition, waste belongs to nobody. On this planet, it is actually the only thing that no one claims ownership over, now that even roots and seeds can belong to an industrial conglomerate. Waste, or pollution in general, is recognized by the fact that it is out of place. Think this through: how do we dissociate dirt from the rest of matter? We do not perceive the sand from beaches as being dirty or unclean because it sits right at the place we assigned to it. In her study on the forms of the sacred, ethnologist Mary Douglas connects this notion to that of social defilement: the sacred is inseparable from pollution and the fear of contagion. All religions develop their own specific rhetoric of defilement, and establish their own purity/impurity classification. Why does the Jewish religion proscribe the consumption of monkfish? Because they do not have scales and therefore do not belong with the fish.

Art doesn’t have a proper place either. Out of all the manifestations of the human mind, it’s the one that is closest to waste because the artist takes upon himself to displace the constituent parts of the world, to present or represent them where they are not expected. Duchamp displaced a bottle rack into an art gallery, the Tuscan painters represented Jesus Christ in a Florentine piazza, Joseph Beuys spoke to a dead hare, Pierre Huyghe brought a dog, bees, and bacteria into his exhibitions: the place art occupies in the field of “unproductive expenditure” is akin to that of waste in that of production. But art generates recyclable energy, while industrial productivism generates pollution and products that will tomorrow become refuse. Human activities all generate some excess, which has a negative side (waste) as well as a positive one (art). And these two polar opposites constantly interact, through symbolic protocols. Art is in fact about border negotiations between what is rejected and what is included, products and waste. What I call an exform is this object that gets caught in this negotiation: between what a given society excludes and rejects, and what the artist intends to show. Gustave Courbet is a prime example: his “realism” is but the act of presenting what the society of his times turned a blind eye to, from The Stonebreakers to The Origin of the World. Let us not forget that waste is defined as “what is cast off when something is made”: misery, reality without ideological guise, sex—no one wanted to see these “unworthy” subjects in the nineteenth century. But Courbet insisted. I call exform any form shaped through a process of exclusion and inclusion, i.e., any sign in transit between center and periphery, floating between power bases and dissenting margins. Between centripetal and centrifugal forces… Courbet’s “realistic” subjects, Marx’s proletariat, and Freud’s unconscious are three main areas of the exform, and all three appeared during the nineteenth century. Allow me to quote myself to drive my point home: “Gestures of expulsion and the waste it entails … constitute an authentically organic link between the aesthetic and the political. Their parallel evolution over the last two centuries may be summarized as a series of inclusive and exclusive movements: on the one hand, the ever-renewed separation of the significant from the insignificant in art; on the other, the ideological frontiers drawn by biopolitics—the governance of human bodies—at the heart of a given society.The Exform, trans. Erik Butler (London: Verso Futures, 2016).” Every society generates waste, that is something they do not want to face. Art is a metaphysics of waste, located at the very heart of this two-pronged movement that governs human production.

The Active and the Neutral

From the aphid all the way to the sensitive and living molecule, the origin of everything, there is no point in all of nature which does not experience pain and pleasure.

Fair enough, but how can creation be imagined without thinking in terms of materials and forms? For instance, buildings will always take on a form and these forms will always be made from materials.

But why oppose one thing to another based on the active-passive model? Truly, everything stems from binary thinking. And we are emerging from the twentieth century, a century that has heightened these dualisms. Alain Badiou summarized it as follows: “The century declared that its law was the Two, antagonism; in this respect, the end of the cold war (American imperialism versus the socialist camp), as the total figure of the Two, also signals the end of the century.Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (New York: Polity Press, 2007).” The origin of this dualism, this thinking in Twos, could be traced back to Aristotle’s theories: he believed that in everything that is brought into existence, hyle, or passive matter, is to be found, and is intended to receive morphe, i.e., active form. We can see how this image, that was to become an infinitely reproducible cliché, is rooted in a sexual imaginary and a hierarchy of gender. It can be found, almost as is, in Schiller’s romantic æsthetics for instance: form represents the “spiritual principle” that works and orders “amorphous” material. It is this classical image that, well beyond the philosophy of art, will feed the ideological rhetorics of capitalism and Western colonialism—that of penetration. Seventeenth-century philosopher Francis Bacon went so far as to justify the exploitation of nature in unambiguous terms, describing matter as a “common harlot” and inviting “any man who … aspires to penetrate further… nature in action” to come together “as true sons of knowledge … [and] find a way at length into her inner chambers,” later calling on readers to “bind her to your service and make her your slave.Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620)” The overexploitation of natural resources is therefore akin to a rape fantasy. This duality between “matter” and “form” seems to be self-evident and to encompass all the arts, but that is the most insidious conditioning. It is the core of binary, dualistic thought on which the Europeans’ drive to conquer the world was based. “Nature,” relegated to the status of inert “matter” and “environment,” must submit to the will of the active principle, accept its condition as a medium on which vir, strength, is imprinted. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir was right about the sexual character of this ideology: “One of the daydreams [man] enjoys is the impregnation of things by his will, shaping their form, penetrating their substance: the woman is par excellence the ‘clay in his hands’ that passively lets itself be worked and shaped.Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 229.” The divide between hyle and morphe is the very formula of subjection, and it has been inscribed in the Western theory of art for the previous two thousand years. Or, in other terms: misogyny and Anthropocene are in league together.Concerning those topics, see Tara Londi, page 367: “Ecofeminist art: on the concept of heritage”

I can’t disagree with that. But isn’t it a bit simplistic to explain everything through the lens of sexuality?

Not through sexuality. Through eroticism, i.e., the use that humans make of it.

Very well, but then how do your artists cope without tools and a medium? Take painting for instance: the colors are very much material, placed on canvas that is equally so.

I was getting to that. We are so used to thinking that an “active principle” necessarily imposes itself on an “inert matter” that our very representations are saturated with dualism. In the West, for the past two thousands years, we have only seen figures against backdrops human beings posted in their environment. Similar to the green screens that are used to shoot special effects in movies, our green spaces seem interchangeable. On one side are spaces and on the other their occupants. So, figures against backdrops: Westerners have been representing themselves in that manner for the past two millennia, in accordance with the certainty of being at the center of a planet located at the center of the world. The human species appears thus as an isolated speaker in a mute world, the single protagonist of an opera in which the sound produced by the other musicians is muted. In the words of anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Europeans “seem to be living in a world where other living creatures are only a part of the environment.”

Artists have now understood that nothing is inert: their artworks are composed with living things, their compositions are imbrications, and they elaborate spaces in their artworks, all elements of which are active, far removed from our artificial hierarchies. There is no more backdrop as everything is now form. A universe of particles that are all equal to one another, subsequently specified by the meaning they take on in social life, thus replace the media and surfaces of classical Western aesthetics. These seemingly similar molecular forms can just as well be conveying cultural hierarchies, the self-construction of the individual in Phillip Zach’s work, or the world of technology with David Douard or Daiga Grantina. And for others still, economics or politics. To summarize, rather than tacking forms on materials that are assumed to be raw or neutral, they operate by putting in contact various aspects of the living, connecting processes and materials to one another. Alice Channer collects debris from construction sites or mussel shells, then modifies their nature and form. Alisa Baremboym creates alloys where ceramics, software, silicone, and surgical lubricants are intertwined. Pamela Rosenkranz introduces molecules or bacteria that impact perception in her exhibitions. Dora Budor works with dust or sprays oxytocin—a brain-altering substance. Agnieszka Kurant put to work millions of termites, supplying them with materials to build their habitat. Jared creates amusement parks for ants and bees. And I cannot forget Pierre Huyghe, who collaborates with bacteria, cancer cells, and hermit crabs.

Let me stop you there: it seems as if the end goal is to get rid of human beings, that human subjectivity has no more value than that of wasps. What you’re describing is a general depoliticization.

The great theme of Marxist thought—which was, by the way, obsessed by reification, which is the opposite process—was the unveiling of social dynamics concealed within the way we interact with things. But the Anthropocene extends this reasoning to the living world, revealing that our relationship with the “natural” world reflects all of our social relationships. The subjectivity of the human species is still manifested in its arts of course, but what changed is that these artists put it in perspective with the totality of global emissions. Inclusion is the effect of this sudden reverberation. Thought as a chorus.

How is that contingent on an end to your dualism? Why suddenly turn away from this relationship between the active and the passive, the tool and the medium?

I mentioned what I mean by “inclusive thought.” Its first basic principle is acknowledging that we are immersed in a finite world: we recognize that we are neither facing it, nor above it, but within it. Wouldn’t you think that this impacts our ways of feeling or reasoning? Our representations? Our method? Contemporary anthropology made us more aware of other ways of thinking, incidentally the very same that the West has tried, and is still trying, to eliminate. For an indigenous person from the Amazon, the forest is a gigantic semiosis: the trees, the wind, the clouds and the animals “produce meaning” as much as any human. Art is another kind of forest—in any case, it is also a semiosis, a semiotic production. We are always in a position of dialogue there, just as an Achuar Indian is in their forest. These are also two relational milieus: remember that Philippe Descola described animals as the “social partners” of the Amazonian Indians. When we visit an exhibition, we are in a state of encounter: the forest, full of meaning and saturated with emissions, is recreated there at a smaller scale. In the so-called art world, which extends through time (we encounter signs from the past there) and space (we get to meet with distant realities), all the minds that gather together, just as with the Achuar Indians after dark. Feeling immersed in the world (or being obliged to do so due to the looming disaster), is first and foremost forgoing the frame of mind that generates all dualisms. During a storm or an earthquake, nothing is frontal or external to us anymore, we are in a holistic space, enveloped, intricated into phenomena. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari sought to “arrive at the magical formula which we all seek: PLURALISM = MONISM, by passing through all the dualisms which are the enemy, the altogether necessary enemy, the furniture which we endlessly shift around.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 64 That cumbersome furniture must once more be moved, and perhaps even cast aside as we move into another space-time.

Framing as a Figure of Inclusion

[N]o, there are [no individuals] … There is only one great individual—that’s the totality.

So is art, according to you, our new nature?

No, because this typically Western nature-culture divide is now meaningless.

So what happens in your forest? 

What is certain is that artists know how to navigate in it. Can I remind you of this sentence from Le Clézio in his novel Haï ?: “There isn’t a single thing in the universe that isn’t natural. Cities and their landscapes are natural, as are the deserts, forests, grasslands, and seas. By creating cities, by inventing concrete, asphalt, and glass, humans have invented a new jungle that they aren’t dwelling in yet.”J.M.G Le Clézio, Haï (Paris: Champs Flammarion, 1971), 36. Well, artists do try to live in that world. And that implies questioning another pillar of Western ideology: productivism. Go to an art exhibition and what you’ll see there is that artists are raising questions on this topic. They are already asking themselves why art would necessarily imply “expressing” oneself, i.e., expelling something out of oneself. Or “producing” anything, i.e., having that something move ahead of oneself. The subjectivity of genius… Instead of that, contemporary artists organize webs of relationships between protagonists, things, and beings, thus forming “a field of subjectivation.” An old idea that can be found in Deleuze and Foucault. But like landscapes, individuals are assembled from a variety of natural and cultural elements, of things that grow and others that die, of patches, and almost geological foundations. Deleuze, again, said that when we meet someone, we unfold the landscape that person carries with them—a history, a geography, a climate. If human beings represent so many landscapes, we cannot continue asking artists to produce in the same way as factories but let them cultivate their forms, manufacture their milieu, prepare their ecosystem. Artists would formerly expel and produce. Nowadays, they guide things to their formal destination, connect them together. Art was then seen as being superimposed on nature; now, artists view their work as a framing exercise on their milieu—which includes objects, beings, and everything in between. Artists are first and foremost concerned with framing. Writing about Villeglé’s ripped posters (and this is no less true for Gerhard Richter’s paintings), Alain Borer wrote that “framing is the only place for the subject, or, if you wish, for the ‘author.’” The creative subject is the one that frames differently, that, finds fresh perspectives.

You’re going to tell me that I’m obsessed with painting, but your idea seems to me to have more do with Duchamp’s ready-mades. 

No, because the framing takes place upstream. The medium has no part in this. Painters are framers like any others. They develop a point of view.

So are you talking about the framing of the image? Just as in certain of Degas’ paintings, the framing seems to be imitating the one imposed by cameras? 

It’s not that either. But let us keep photography in mind. For inclusive thinking, framing is above all about signifying, or signaling, a point of view. We can see only from one point, as Lacan said, though we are looked at from all sides. We can only see from one point: let us take that as the underpinning of my idea of framing. The artist’s subjectivity doesn’t manifest itself through something that would come out of them, but through the exploration and deepening of a point of view, of a unique position in the world. To frame is to bring something that we perceive into a visual format; it is to compose (or rather, to recompose) from a singular vantage point, which belongs only to the artist in question—first of all, because any physiology is unique.

Rather than projecting what they have in their mind onto the world, artists welcome the world, accomodate the world within them. But how is this different from passivity, which men readily associate with feminity?

Inclusive thinking begins by overcoming that opposition. For instance, the yin and yang of Daoist ontology aren’t opposed, but dynamically intertwined. But we must first overcome these two concepts of the active and the passive, which we always tend to view as bearing the mark of obviousness. That will be all the more difficult in the realm of art given that the avant-garde artists of the twentieth century have lent to the concept of activity an emancipatory political subtext: the modernist ideal was to dissolve the division between (active) producer and (passive) consumer, which conforms with the political ideal of a society with an active citizenship. Art reflects this ideal in “observer participation,” or Joseph Beuys’ famous “everyone is an artist.” Ergo, any figures of “non-doing” are given bad press in the West. I specify the West as this isn’t the case in China, where non-doing (wu wei) is cast in a positive light, and where the pictorial process is inseparable from an impregnation. One must allow oneself to be penetrated by the world, and the quality of the reception makes the artist as much as the manner in which they compose their forms: as you can see, a new eroticism of thought is at play here, at the same time as the primacy of masculinity over femininity, of form over matter, of subject over object, recede. Artists develop a specific capacity to receive the world, before even learning to respond through an offshoot of the self—a thing that comes from the brain, that is produced. The fundamental question is: what do you really see in that which is visible to your eyes? Depending on the answer, whether you are a doctor, an artist, or a banker can be determined.

This may be a bit far off from your subject matter, but couldn’t we describe your inclusive thinking through another—prehistoric—analogy, between what you call “framing” and the practice of harvesting wild plants? This form of foraging lies between being active and receiving, while hunting is another matter altogether…

Indeed, and that is why photography has nothing to do with my notion of framing. It is not a matter of “shooting,” a term that evokes predation and capture. Being an artist is first about determining the following: what do we allow to come within the frame? In French, “harvesting” (cueillir) and “welcoming” (accueillir) are cognates and both derive from the Latin verb colligere, to gather, as does the word “collection.” We harvest, and welcome, in order to gather. Every artwork assembles this harvest, this welcoming of the world, based on an original decision or a principle. However, the relationship to the world that occurs in Western art is more driven toward predation. As one of André Malraux’s Japanese friends told him in front of Nashi Falls, “European painting has always aspired to catch the butterflies, eat the flowers, and bang the dancers.” It seems to me that other artistic traditions, and I’m thinking about Chinese painting here, are based on the artist’s position in the world, not on their movement of capture: Western art projects, it is a javelin thrown against the world, and the first projectile is that of ego. A new intellectual synthesis is now appearing, one that doesn’t confuse intelligence with analytical skills anymore, but equates it to how relevant the framing is: it is how the artist’s gaze is positioned that matters. To be an artist is to define and to deepen one’s position, to build a point of view.

I will refer to what I know best, cinema. Serge Daney has sung the praise of the shot and reverse shot, which he believed was the foundation of a true aesthetic democracy, given that it includes the other. It is a dialogic visual figure.

Yes, that is a real position. And inclusion begins by affirming a point of view in a shot. But the shot and reverse shot is an (all-too) human face-to-face interaction. I would define art as a system for drawing from a milieu, evidence of an active presence within an ecosystem. Inclusion is here contrasted with production.

A New Savage Thought

All beings circulate through each other—thus all the species … everything is in a perpetual flux… Every animal is more or less a human being, every mineral is more or less a plant, and every plant is more or less an animal.

In other words, the figures of receiving and welcoming should be extolled, against the figures of intrusion or invasion. In both English and French, “penetration” is synonymous with intelligence, discernment, depth. But to be on the receiving end is to be an idiot, and typically a female idiot. 

As time goes on, I’m increasingly convinced that Lévi-Strauss had a stroke of genius when he based his anthropology on a monist view of the world: our brain “accomplishes operations that do not differ in nature from those that have been unwinding in the world.” What we refer to as the environment, i.e., our biotope, is in his view nothing more than our “biological framework.” To be an anthropologist is, in his own words, to “reintegrate culture in nature and ultimately… life in the totality of its physico-chemical conditions.” What we call ideas or works therefore resemble the buds, fruits, and butterfly wings, as well as the sea shells that Paul Valéry meditated upon, seeing them as neither random chance nor necessity. It is when the world is regarded as one, and not bound under some form of dualism in which the human species would be the active face, that artistic activity can unfold as a position (from which we frame and include) and no longer as a mirror. Just as in the primitive societies described by Lévi-Strauss, contemporary artists make a selection of combinations based on an inventory of aesthetical positions and available forms. These primary themes are arranged in patterns, expressing a conceptual structure that is more or less apparent. Every artistic creation is therefore tinkering based on a finite number of forms, formats, and colors. The Western myth of “progress” in the arts that we’ve been spoon-fed from a very young age is but another fable. And the historical juncture we are going through is interesting precisely due to the need to elaborate a new one.

Will this new narrative be purely human? 

Nothing is linear anymore, not even ecology. Anna Tsing, who tells the story of our time through the matsutake mushroom, refers to the “disturbance-based ecologies” that form “new assemblages, unexpected alliances” between species that cohabit among precarious environments, entangled together. One may then wonder: do human art and animal products differ in nature? On what basis can the distinction between human and animal productions be made? There is no need to point out how important this borderland is, as it is at the very core of the pandemic we just experienced, but its exploration will also lead us to rethinking artistic activity. It is the seedbed of a new narrative.

Roger Caillois thought that paintings should be “presented as the human variety of butterfly wings,” because art is nothing more that a “special case within nature.” Zoologist Adolf Portmann saw feathers, hair, and scales as “organs of apparition” (organes de l’apparaître), which he called phanères, that is, as many aesthetic formulas enabling an animal’s individuality to be expressed. In other words, animals present their individuality through visual forms, for the purposes of communication. What difference is there with the art of humans, if only a few degrees of complexity? As Laurent Jenny put it, “Nature also has its abstracts, and even, among them, adepts of op art (animals with disruptive livery such as the zebra, which are, in short, contemporaries of Vasarely), while others seem to ride down the road of lyrical abstraction.”Laurent Jenny, “Le Principe de l’inutile,” Critique #788-89 (2013). This is not to suggest that art should be seen as some sort of function, but rather to reconsider it as living matter: human beings, unlike the butterflies that carry their art on themselves, consider it as a projection, or even a dejection. They externalize in the same way wings are externalized through the invention of airplanes and claws through the invention of swords. Artists are butterflies projecting their work onto external mediums—or rather, as Roger Caillois mischievously puts it: butterflies are “introverted painters.”

Animals and humans can therefore be found in your forest, but do they behave in the same way?  

Deleuze saw the commencement of art, not in impression or shaping, as most philosophers, but in the notion of territory. In light of this, art starts with an articulation between color, line, and song. Animals are constantly “on the alert” in the jungle, and there lies what they have in common with artists: they are extremely vigilant in scanning their surroundings. Animals do this for their very survival; artists to feed their projection. Having antennae is more important than having hands. From an anthropological point of view, and I return to Lévi-Strauss, art could very well help us adjust to our milieu, become well integrated in our ecosystem: impressionism, after the immense natural landscapes of the previous centuries, acclimatized human beings to a suburban environment made of gardens and panoramas always surrounded by buildings. Cubism tightened the focus even more, leaving only café tables and human products to be seen. Lévi-Strauss stopped there but we could see in abstraction a willingness, or the necessity, to break free from shared spatial coordinates; or perhaps, from the very first incursion of artists into the tiny and the immense, as all abstract paintings end up looking as if they depicted something viewed from a plane or a microscope. Twenty-first century art, with its interspecies processes and its collapsed spaces seems to be preparing the minds of people to a world that is devoid of nature and animals, to a lethal entanglement, to this “disturbance-based ecology” Anna Tsing talks about. What is striking is that the significant artworks of our age tend toward a certain level of savagery—in the sense that they run counter to “progress,” to this “civilizing” process on which the narrative of Western art was built.

Savage? I thought that word had become derogatory…

Lévi-Strauss tried to rehabilitate “savage thought” as early as 1962. He was poorly understood to the point that the title of his book was translated in English as The Savage Mind, substituting the French word for thought/thinking with the word “mind,” as if (philosophical) thought couldn’t arise from Amazonian tribes. The term “savage” is an operator that we’ve used to refer to otherness, both human and non-human. The adjective extends to all living things, from forests to animals and barbarians: everything that hasn’t been domesticated, tamed by the Great Rationalization kicked off by European capitalism from the sixteenth century onward and that eventually made the standard of money and the pixel prevail throughout the living world. In French, we use the same word for “savage” and “wild” and wild/savage spaces are those that are “uninhabited and uncultivated,” while wild/savage animals are those that are “undomesticated and hard to tame.” Simply put, savage is “everything that comes naturally, without being cultivated.”

In the field of architecture, we are increasingly concerned with green walls and the inclusion of the living.

And in contemporary cuisine, there is a revival of fermentation, which consists in supporting and guiding bacteria in processing food. This is perhaps the cuisine of the degrowth movement? Production figures give way everywhere to those of conduction. Nothing is more exciting than taking part in this new era: it seems to me as though everything must be rethought (repensé)… or rather expended (dépensé).

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