1. Could you share a bit about your background and what led you to start your art practice?

I grew up in the countryside of Charente-Maritime, in a tiny village, which was surrounded by monoculture fields. It's a landscape that is often perceived as natural, but actually, that’s not really true. It's been entirely shaped by human activity for agricultural production.

I believe that landscapes can sometimes shape our minds. Monoculture exists in the background of mine, as the peaceful hills of the famous Windows 95 wallpaper, which is called Bliss. There is a certain irony in this title when we know that this landscape is actually the result of a phylloxera epidemic, a plant disease caused by a tiny insect, which required the suppression of all California vineyards for the benefit of beautiful green grass.

I always loved insects, plants and stones.

I actually wanted to become a scientist when I was younger, but I understood really fast that it wouldn't be possible because of my results at school—but I realized that it was kind of possible to observe and work with nature in other ways, and that's what I found with drawing.

My dream at this time was to join a scientist named Francis Hallé, and work on his Radeau des Cimes expeditions. It is a floating platform that moves on the canopy of primary forests to study their flora and fauna; for me, it sounds like a dream. 

I have this one particular memory about animals and plants; it was a significant moment of disillusionment. When I first visited the Natural History Museum in Paris and saw the gallery dedicated to recently extinct species, it was a real shock for me… seeing those stuffed beings, well conserved, but forever gone. Even though I couldn’t fully grasp or articulate it at the time, I became aware of the dystopia of the present and the failure of Western naturalism to protect all these things to which it had given Latin names.

I’ve always been interested in fictional or virtual worlds, through video games or books.

I used to love to write, tell, and perform stories. I have a lot of interest in hybrid art forms, such as comics books, which is something between narrative, drawing, and object. I studied cinema in high school, which also combines writing, acting, movements, bodies, sculpture, imagery, dreams, sounds, and spaces. 

I then went to Beaux-Arts school in Paris where I joined the studio of Jean-Luc Vilmouth, which was oriented towards installation. Strangely, perhaps because of the weight of the institution and traces of academism, I spent a lot of time learning oil painting. But three months before my third-year diploma I realized that I wasn't doing the right thing or my thing, so I stopped painting, and I tried to reconnect with more sensitive and personal interests. 

At this time, I reconnected with drawing and I created my own paper sheets by mixing old papers with water. When it dries, it kind of becomes three-dimensional because the paper starts to curl and to exist into space like a sculpture. 

Following this idea, I wanted to try to stretch the elements of drawing, like when Duchamp said he wanted to stretch a little bit the law of physics, I was like, how can I stretch drawing? 

The graphite of the pencil turned into iron bars, and I learned how to weld. Paper mixed with water turned into pulp, which dried into three-dimensional objects. Plants, from which the paper pulp originated, also reappeared in my work. All these reflections brought me somewhere between sculpture, performance, and installation, but for me, I was still drawing. 

Alongside my studies I started cultivating a garden in the countryside where my parents still live in Charente. I trained myself  in herbalism—the use of aromatic and medicinal plants—and I did some experiments with cultivation techniques. I learned a lot from those practices, watching the plants and the way they grew in cycles. I started to make links between vegetative economy and how we produce, make, preserve or show art—I think that was a really important moment in my work, in my understanding, and in what became my main area of research.

It also became a little source of income when I started creating herbal tea blends under the pseudonym Simple Pied. Names of the plants, color of the beverage or taste, and medicinal properties are all elements with which I play to compose these mixtures. I used to serve these brews during exhibitions, festivals, or in collaboration with artists, musicians. It happened to be a shortcut to some artistic spaces and unexpected opportunities.

Then, in 2018, I went to Greece for a six-month Erasmus program. Many significant things happened there.

I could not help but see it as a kind of return to some sorts of origins, the origin of my language, the  Latin language and its etymology, but also of art and mythology, in a city where ancient ruins arise here and there and coexist with the contemporary world. It was also a return to sea, in a territory mainly composed of islands. It was really important in my work with paper because I had all the elements that I needed—papers from the street that I could recycle, water and sun, and even the architecture full of terraces and rooftops allowed me to work outside with the elements. 

I began to write my thesis there. It was about the influence of the sea sponge on the human imagination. Sea sponges filter the oceans to build their being, they are the oldest lineage of all animals, so we descend from them. I was trying to consider how the relation with the spongy skeleton of this creature could have shaped our perception of materiality, and then how it shaped our imagination. But also how we find it in art, industry, and literature (such as Francis Ponge..)

To explore this, I spent time on the island of Kalymnos, which is the place that legend says the first sponge hunters came from. In my investigation and research, I met many people, plants, animals, and legends. I had a camcorder and I did a movie I haven't edited yet. The paper sculptures I made there were used in a theater play, and I witnessed for the first time how objects can change into props and be used on stage.

One last thing I started while I was in Greece was a practice of creating plant assemblages to document the local vegetation. I give them the form of living organisms and I take photographs of these living herbariums in the palm of hand. I call them Fairies, Fées, and I’ve continued doing them ever since as a scientific protocol.

2. What themes does your work explore? 

I really like the notion of theatre and the theatricality of mundane things. For example, I see a theatrical organization in the agricultural process of monoculture. Since my fifth-year diploma in Beaux Arts, I've been considering the open space of agricultural land as an open stage where natural and human things happen and constantly change. This idea is also the literal application of a 17th-century agronomy book written by Olivier de Serres, titled Le Théâtre d'agriculture et mesnage des champs

I work a lot on landscape, territory, and cartography. I'm really interested in folklore and mythology. Also, the idea of appearance and disappearance, the visible and the invisible. I used to work a lot with greenscreen, which allows you to disappear or to appear.

This year, I was really into green. It’s funny to think that if plants appear green to our eyes, it is because their leaves absorb all colors except green. They reject it… maybe plants actually hate green! Since it turns out to be the color of nature, ecology, green politics, and greenwashing, it has become a concept that needs to be deconstructed. 

I am interested in the possible nuances between activation and activism. When I work with chlorophyll directly extracted from plants, there is always something about activating spaces, activating things, since the color doesn’t last long because it oxidizes. This means that the green will necessarily fade away. I accept this inevitability, and rather than finding ways to fix the green, I seek ways to reactivate it—which is convenient since green grass and weeds are easy to find almost everywhere. Basing this practice on vegetation implies following its cycles; it brings a question of seasonality into art. The issue of conservation shifts, it is no longer about preserving a work from the elements and time, but about maintaining vegetation that allows us to continue activating the work. The art center truly becomes a center, concentrating its environment. In this perspective, I'm really interested in structures, things that change into structures, and how to change the structures themselves.

I also have a sort of bestiary that I like to invoke in my work. It’s the case of dandelion Taraxacum dens leonis, this wild salad with jagged leaves, or the wood pigeon, whose song formed the soundtrack of my adolescence. They are both things that we can always find in a perimeter of 100 meters or less; they’re everywhere but often invisible. They're living at the frontier of our perceived world.

3. How has your work evolved over the years, and what has influenced those changes? 

I will use a metaphor to talk about the evolution of my art because that's something that I’ve been thinking about since Greece, actually. 

I used to compare my interests and my research to a bakery. What I like about a bakery is that every morning you go, the bread is warm and delicious and you can eat it, and I was wondering: can my art practice be like that? Can I produce objects that are made to be, not consumed, but produced over and over? And that's why I chose paper, because you can put it into water and it becomes a paste again, and you can shape it in another way. I love this impermanence of paper that can change infinitely. 

But then I wanted to maybe go back further, and before the bread is the flour, the seeds, and the plant itself. I think that period started two years ago when I really began to work with chlorophyll. It’s a living pigment that’s green and alive, which allows the unrivaled miracle of plant photosynthesis.

I see it like a sort of pure energy, and it led me to begin an experimental and performing practice. I wanted to confront pure chlorophyll with the architecture of the bakery itself. So that's how I started to do what I call “Verdissages,” which can evoke the “vernissage,” where historically, artists used to put a last layer of varnish on the painting during the opening. Using grass or green plants to put the green on the art center’s facade, so it becomes activated and it’ll last a few hours and then it's gone. It's a way to think about collective forms of activation and folklore and fictional popular manifestation. 

Now there’s been a change because I have my studio. At first, I didn't want to have one because I thought it was more interesting to work outside or with the constraint of having no space, to work with the context, with small, subtle, and clever touches. But some projects have forced me to have a space. So now I’m in my studio, and it leads me to work on what sustains the endless production of the bread in the bakery. Things like the aluminum plates, and the equipment that allows the baker to make bread every day. So, unlike chlorophyll and its rapid oxidation, I shifted to focus on stainless steel.

It's really the contrary, and I found it funny to go to the complete opposite side of things.

I started to do objects with inoxidable iron, and those sculptures often serve as supports for collective and performative activation. 

I like to contradict myself. I don't know how it will evolve, I think it's a really living research. It may become an oil painting again, who knows? Finally, is not a work of art a bakery in which one can serve oneself infinitely?

4. Where do you find inspiration for your work?

I think I do a lot of research. I read a lot on the internet, but also in books. I'm really inspired by scientific literature, botanical or agronomy books, but also science fiction, theoretical and political essays, and poetry. Also, as I said, my practice of agriculture inspires me a lot and I learned a lot from this. It's a big influence. 

My friends have also always been a significant source of inspiration. 

I'm also very influenced by the spaces where I go, the architecture, and everything that composes the ecology of a place: people, plants, animals. Projects become ways to enter ecosystems and social structures, taking on the role of a witness or a disruptor.

The works of Pierre Lieutaghi have greatly influenced my thinking, as well as the entire field of research known as ethnobotany, which explores the relationships between plants and societies.

The critical and decolonial approach of naturalism by philosophers, writers, and artists such as Toni Morrisson or Uriel Orlow, has also been a key element in my reflections.

5. Can you walk us through your creative process and how you bring an idea to life?

I increasingly see myself as a researcher; my artworks are sort of experiments.

But I also see myself as a storyteller, as the pieces I create stem from a personal fable.

I do have a secret narrative that creates links between all my projects, but that's not something I make visible. I often have ideas of pieces that I can wait sometimes two, five, ten years to happen before it comes to life.

I make many sketches. I like doing sketchings in notebooks or A4 papers… I love A4 papers, isn’t it a golden ratio? If you divide it or multiply it by two it keeps its proportions to infinity. I like the idea that these sketches are between the infinitely large and the infinitely small, as imaginary things. I also like to join those sketches to the project, to make paper pulp with it or to show it in the final work.

Often, I'm waiting for a material opportunity to bring my project to life. If I found a residency or an exhibition, it can happen really fast. Sometimes I forget to think about the project for two years, and then it appears to me really clearly that it's the right place, the right time to do it. So yeah, I have this kind of reservoir of living ideas, and I pick from it and mix things together.

I have a practical mind, but always sabotaged by clumsiness and a taste for chaos. I enjoy thinking up clever assemblies, like a delicate hunter designing a trap. But what interests me even more in the idea of hunting is the ambush—the moment when you put yourself in the place of the Otherness and, in doing so, change.

Since I have a studio now, I work a lot with material I found outside. Because in the studio, there are only things coming from yourself, so it's really important for me to work with those materials that the streets give you, and I’ll try to store it, a bit like my ideas. Then suddenly it appears that it's the right object, the right material to be used for the project. 

It’s like bringing magic and chance into the studio. 

6. What is the project you're most proud of to date? 

That's really a hard question. I am proud of many things I have achieved… some exhibitions, for example, the one I did in Le Louvre. It was just unbelievable to see my art so close from all those artifacts from all periods of time. I often think about the fact that most Greek sculptures, temples, and even churches, used to be painted and colorful. The project I made there involved plants from Tuileries gardens, to bring those living colors into this museum conceived as a temple of conservation, where organic substances are usually banned. 

But, one month ago, I also staged this performance in a really old Italian-style theater with nine performers. It was an exploration about the idea of the theatricality of urban green space. It was a big achievement, involving a movie, interviews of various characters in charge of or in relation with urban vegetation, a series of sculptures, music, and many workshops with the students of circus school. It is even too fresh to process it all, and an exhibition that archives this work will take place this summer.

On the other hand, all these things feel so tiny, diluted in the world. I am also really proud of things I haven't done. I mean, I'm really happy to sometimes take the time to just do nothing. 

7. Do you see yourself staying in Paris long-term, or are there other cities that inspire you to work there?

I am, as I said, in between Paris and Charente-Maritime. So, for the moment, I really appreciate Paris because I can run away anytime. My studio is in Aubervilliers. I like this marginal space between Paris and the suburbs where there is the periphery. It's a complex knot of infrastructures, flows, cultures, plants, and animals, and everything mixes and transforms so intensely. It is an interesting place to think about art; you can really see the violence of society toward any marginal forms of life there. 

Since my diploma, I’m always trying to connect spaces. In France, we have this program of “ville jumellées”… and I love this idea that two places can have a link, like two particles in quantum theory. But also, it's important to realize that Paris could not exist without the countryside. It’s two faces of the same sheet. It's all connected with agriculture and “nature,” and I try to show this through my practice, to open portals…

But to answer the question, I may leave Paris at one point. Join a group of artists and friends or something. I feel linked with the territory I grew up in, and as I do research about its past, I wish I could witness and participate in its future. 

8. What would you like to accomplish in the next few years? 

I have this dream of writing a book, but I think I will not be doing that in the next few years… It would be about the past, the present, and the future of monoculture, through all the narratives I have developed in my different projects. I would also love to find a way to publish my series of Fairies (Fées), the plant assemblages, to archive it and share it with others.

In the next few years, I would love to maybe teach more, and find a place like a post-diploma to be an artist-researcher, and to organize workshops, or something like that. 

I’d like to organize three simultaneous solo shows in three different spaces, to archive all my previous work, and initiate a sort of discussion between all these works.

9. If there's one thing you hope people take away from your work, what would it be? 

I hope people could see the joyful and playful attitude I try to have… about not running into clear forms, keep things at a simple state of living, and try to think about the structure of art, of how we show, how we conserve art, and why we are doing this, for which system. 

My wish would be to influence practices that blur this famous frontier between nature and culture through the use and relation with plants. 

It seems that we are at a turning point for society. I think we’ll now have to cure what we have polluted, to adapt to what we have created, and to evolve in order to do so… After all, are we going to become sponges again ?

Also, when I teach or work with children, It's really nice to see that, when I ask them, for example, to use fresh plants to draw, there is something happening in their mind. Suddenly beautiful colors come out of things, and you are allowed to paint whatever you want: the table, the wall, or even the school. For some of them, I have the feeling that it could, not change their life, but change the way they see things, and how they can use their direct environment in a subversive and free way. 

I would like to continue in that way, and to be continued.