Foreword
Martine Michard
(excerpt, p. 13)
It was back in 2009. It has taken almost two years for the plan
behind this book to materialise. Over this time, environmental
questions have crept up the agenda, making the questions
raised by the WORLDWATCHERS artists still more topical. But why,
in the delightful valley of the Lot, where life flows on practically
untroubled, should one worry oneself about environmental
risks that loom much more threateningly elsewhere? Why fret
about anxious-making ecological questions in our relatively
comfortable home? And why should art be socially committed
when its primary purpose is with purely aesthetic concerns?
Above and beyond all the dogma and the theory, in today's context
the theme of ecology is bound to inform much of our thinking.
Anchored in a bucolic landscape from which art emerged tens of
thousands of years ago, and yet plugged into the contemporary
arts scene, we cannot but be receptive to present-day global
problems. Our thinking is motivated both by natural curiosity and
by an urge to express solidarity. The question of art and its raison
d'être infuse each and every project: concerned with landscape,
with humankind, or with forms of representation generally, each
piece forms part of the ceaseless ebb and flow of ideas, of the
dynamic, active dimension of thought.
Thus, turning away from romanticism and nostalgia that create
images of nature solely to magnify its beauty, today landscape
is no longer just an object of contemplation, pure fusion or
ecstasy. It is an object of discussion and strategy, a platform for
action. Nature and the planet now seem precarious, perishable.
To make our own the signs, the topography, the typology of the
environment so as to extract their potential for polemic and
transgression, and thus renew our way of seeing our common
inheritance: such is our ambition and such too is the challenge
proposed by our artistic policy.
On the initiative of
WORLDWATCHERS, the artists of
Art Orienté Objet have in the past already posed similar questions in other
locations under other latitudes. In the village of Saint-Cirq-
Lapopie, they chose to partake in the intellectual and artistic
enterprise of a strand of ecological thinking (understood as a
“science of the conditions of existence”) and joined forces with
artists Amy Balkin, Gilles Bruni,
Seamus Farrell, Romain Pellas,
and Akira Sunrise.
(...)
