Nature
2023

“Every lingering remnant in adults’ memory of the atmosphere of enchanted forests,
every last vestige in them of belief in miracles, every breath of theirs which still inhales a perfume of fairytales reveals itself beneath the wretched,
crazed disguise of these feebly invented landscapes”
Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant

Here, not far from Paris, were marshes, which became a vegetable plain of one of the largest agricultural territories in Europe.
Between 1952 and 1972, gypsies from Andalusia settled here, as well as Roma from Eastern Europe, Portuguese, Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Yugoslavians, and a few French families, in insalubrious conditions, in what was known as the Campa slum.

Now, one seems to feel there this « feeling of nature » dear to the surrealists, and that the peasant of Aragon experienced when he walked through the park of Buttes-Chaumont, north of the concomitant capital.

Like the latter, the Parc de La Courneuve was invented and built from scratch.
Spread over five communes, it imposes its opulent landscape on the rough and dry of the Paris suburbs.
Vast plains, belvederes, mounts and pyramids: everything is aimed at re-appropriating a perspective free from the housing blocks that streak the viewer’s eyes just a few steps away, and which here can only be discerned from above, rendered minuscule by the strength of the mineral vantage points.

If there is NATURE, it is in a double language game: first, the one fenced, arranged, structured, by the landscapers and then reinterpreted by the occupants. Here, dense vegetation and stone sculptures, dark woods and clear lines, modern practices and the primitive power of trees are confronted and mixed.

Through the constitutive duality of the park, the inner strength of the beings who cross it is revealed, their nature in a second sense. An enclosed space, but a space of freedom, it creates its autonomy and its aesthetic independence at the same time by its porosity – the entrance is free – and its opacity.

In the silence of the place, contemporaneity sinks into this hybrid space as into an original reverse, creating an asynchronous picture where reality becomes fable. And then, as in the words of Aragon, “reflect faithfully the vast sentimental regions where the city dwellers wild dreams stir”.