l’Hacienda project is a broad research on the vicinity of declining landscapes under climate change and the initiatives some communities have taken to face it, despite a global lack of interest. From June 2019 to March 2020, our duo was invited to an art residency in the Natural Parc of Haut-Jura, to research on the advent of renewable energy amongst rural areas.
We were told we would receive a confident testimony of the birth of transitional landscape, filled with individual and collective initiatives. As we’ve met with inhabitants living in areas apart from core governances ; as we’ve heard their guilts over the least of one’s wastage ; as we’ve interviewed those who draft zero carbon regional policies ; as we’ve drifted through forests and alongside electric wires ; it took us little time to find out that this bucolic landscape is at its end. It’s lost. The forest is being destroyed one too-long-summer after another. For the last couple of years, grass eventually turned yellow, trees dried by numbers, bees disappeared, snow was missed. Transition we’ve seen, from the frontline of climate change.
No climate-skeptic here : we were stunned by the foresight and knowledge people had. Thus, we acted as bystanders to their involvements ; we explained that elsewhere no-one cares, and the wreckage they are witnessing is sole and unique. Their « rural perceptiveness » appeared as a necessity for the birth of a climate-related esthetic of space.
To conclude our residency, we built l’Hacienda : a climatic performance recording the state of the forest.
The sun’s path is engraved onto a herbarium made of beeswax with inlays of spruces and box-trees: the main substances of this landscape irremediably jeopardized. No-one expects any other outcome: the spruce forest and its undergrowth box-trees, which has been the economical and pictural appeal of this territory for centuries, is lost. And, it’s with the collected evidences of a specific transitional nature that we’ve worked: samples of Picea abies, bright green, faded, and desiccated at the same time ; Buxus, vigorous, dried, and reappearing at the same time ; and evidences of predation: Cydalima perspectalis and their chrysalis ; Ips typographus and the imprints of their tunneling on spruce’s bark. On Saturday, the 14th of March 2020, this herbarium was exposed as a filmstrip under the concentrated solar energy of our 48-fresnel-lenses-camera. Under sun action, for four hours, the installation irreversibly declined, producing a luminous phenomenon to gaze at, and recording every weather variations.
l’Hacienda is an ephemeral Temple to the Sun, a phosphene production device. It is a gift to a secluded community standing on the verge of global crisis. And we thoughtfully took advantage of their propensity for contemplation, by making them witnesses of a climatic performance that would happen only once. Some understood it well, and felt privileged being able to gaze at 48 suns, while we were making this statement : « we don’t intend to prolong the mechanistic civilizations and frigid architecture that ultimately lead to boring leisure… we must build the Hacienda» Gilles Yvain, 1st International Situationist, 1958
We are a collaborative art duo formed in 2016 in Paris and based in Marseille. Trained as architects and urban planners, our practice has widened to a polymorphic artistic research which sole aim is to produce the evidence that our cultural identities are rooted into ecological systems, therefore considering art as an active production of knowledge. From an ever-growing sense of ethics and critical synthesis, our work uses narrative material to describe multi-scalar or translocal interplays within common situations, thus enlightening the bond between nature, violence, and politics. Our production ranges from writing to pictural or sculptural materials: all of those, as correlated elements of meaning, are gathered into broader projects defined by specific territorial corpus. Chapters of this continuous and complex research, in-situ installations seek synthesis while highlighting phenomenons through an immersive individual experience.
Praising interbreeding as a mean to deepen the survey of local realities, our work finds its way through a consistent collaborative process of creation, based on the diversity and indivisibility of our two characters.
Odysseas Yiannikouris (Clermont-ferrand, 1984), was born to a czech-cypriot couple of artists installed in the center of France. He worked as an architect in Nicosia, Clermont-Ferrand, Montreal, and Paris. In 2017, he is a fellow of the French academy in Rome - Villa Medici.
Alessandra Monarcha (Rio-de-Janeiro, 1988), was born to a Brazilian couple of architects. In 1991 she moved to Venise. She studied at the IUAV and ENSA Versailles. She worked as an architect and urban planner, in Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and Rome. In 2020, she is a fellow of the French academy in Madrid - Casa de Velasquez