Flore des friches urbaines

As a lecturer at Laboratoire Image, Ville, Environnement at the University of Strasbourg, Audrey Muratet explores and studies the composition and dynamics of biodiversity in cities. She extends her work as an ecologist and botanist by bringing together in her research the approaches of geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, managers, and artists. In addition to her scientific contributions, she has published numerous naturalist guides.

Myr Muratet is a Paris-based photographer. His work involves cities, both those he lives in and those he visits, and he carries it out from within their very sinews. The comings and goings in the places that he observes multiply according to his encounters with the people he photographs. This work has been under way for several years and has no determinate duration; in this way, he has created Paris-Nord, a series of photographs begun in 2003, about the people who use the Gare du Nord and about the mechanisms put in place to coerce and contain them. The series that he has already begun overlap one other and together constitute a kind of addendum to the topology of the forms and mechanisms that are adopted by the agents of the processes, processors and other procedures that are involved. Without interrupting these series, Myr Muratet has shown more recently in Wasteland, CityWalk, Calais, the results of hugely destructive policies and the work of “sanitation professionals” under the boot of the petty bosses of the “administration of containment.” In this work in progress, he investigates the notions of occupation and invasion in the abandoned urban areas of Seine-Saint-Denis. One might say that it is a way to make a fixed photographic representation of a systematic concatenation of methods of counterinsurgency, and then to go beyond it. The intersection of these different series reveals the stakes of domination and abuse exercised by all powers, be they digital, economic, or aesthetic. A paltry gesture perhaps, but nonetheless effective, at least as a lament and clearing of the accounts for these wounded spaces and the people who inhabit them.

A graphic designer with a degree from the Basel School of Applied Arts, Marie Pellaton mainly publishes books and catalogues, and more recently flora and animal guides. She creates her own typographies, draws for her graphic "productions". Her artistic research consists in observing, insufflating rhythm, tempo and order to everyday objects: a sensitive taxonomy of the scientist.