A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans

This site-specific sculpture was born as a response to my excursions and walks through the pine-covered hills, the wheat fields, and the vineyards around Val Joanis, Provence, southern France. I wandered in search of things that would capture my curiosity: deer leaping between the vine rows, fields full of snails, muddy boar pits and flattened grass beds where they rest, owls surveying fields for rodents, the scorching drought coming up from the south, the humidity and storms coming down from the hills, and the people who, over the years, have shaped this land.

The sculpture became a map of this territory, its inhabitants, human and non-human, and the interactions between them that I observed during my stay. In it are the hills, the arrival of the drought, the waterways, the kingdom of animals living in the dry fields and those taking refuge in the shade of the pines, and at its base, the people who have shaped this land.

The work takes its title from Jakob von Uexküll's concept of the "umwelt," the idea that each living being perceives and inhabits its own distinct world. This resonates with Gilles Clément's notion of the "garden" as an environment shaped by a living species to claim as its own, and with his drawings mapping the exchanges between plants, which inspired the wooden sticks I used to trace relationships across the sculpture. Its overall form recalls that of a unicellular organism, holding within it a nucleus, itself a world within a world. In this sense, the sculpture is a microcosm within a microcosm: the small world of Val Joanis that I had the chance to explore, encapsulated within a shape that echoes the very origins of life.

Cypress timber, wood-fired ceramics, wax, ink, pebbles

2026

Dimensions: 96 × 48 × 12 cm