LA NUIT OBSCURE DE L’ÂME VÉGÉTALE

2025

Sound, photographic, and video installation
Composed from a text by Michael Marder, The Shrub Diaries
Created from prints developed with phenol extracted from a Leucothoe shrub, and inks produced from plants collected along the 2KM4 transect.

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La Nuit obscure de l’âme végétale unfolds as a project in three chapters where photography becomes both medium and milieu of metamorphosis. Drawing from Metamorphoses reimagined Michael Marder’s rewriting of Ovid’s words, the work reflects on transformation as a material and historical condition. What happens when photography, so often understood as a technology of fixation, returns to processes of change, instability, and organic becoming?
The installation creates a space of interlacing, from liquid to image, from dream to chemistry, where plant matter becomes both medium and agent of metamorphosis. It is a space to inhabit, a sensitive ecology of transformation.

LA NUIT OBSCURE DE L’ÂME VÉGÉTALE

2025

Installation sonore, photographique et vidéo
Composée à partir d’un texte de Michael Marder, The Shrub Diaries (Le journal d’un buisson).
Réalisée à partir de tirages développés avec le phénol d’un buisson de Leucothoe et d’encres élaborées à partir des plantes du transect 2KM4.

La Nuit obscure de l'âme végétale se déploie comme un projet en trois chapitres où la photographie devient à la fois médium et milieu de métamorphose. S'appuyant sur Metamorphoses Reimagined, la réécriture par Michael Marder des Métamorphoses d'Ovide, cette série photographique explore la transformation comme condition matérielle et historique. Que se passe-t-il lorsque la photographie, si souvent perçue comme une technique de fixation, retvient aux processus de changement, d'instabilité et de devenir organique ?

L’installation instaure u espace de correspondance du liquide à l’image, du rêve à la chimie, où la matière végétale devient à la fois médium et agent de la métamorphose. Un espace à percevoir, une écologie sensible de la transformation.

ChapTER 1 - Leucothoe

Sound and video installation, prints developed with leucothoe phenol
Collaboration with philosopher Michael Marder and composer Floriane Pochon

In this installation, the image and the sound becomes a theatre of metamorphoses. Growing from the metamophosis by Michael Marder of Ovid's metamorphosis, The Shrub diaries, it invites to meditation on transformations: from the mortal Leucothoe to the vegetal, from chemistry to light.

In the foreground, a glass balloon holds the liquid memory of a plant that has become a photographic developer. This living precipitate writes the images as much as it reveals them. Each photograph, thus revealed by the plant matter, participates in this shared becoming, as if the image itself were returning to nature. In this darkness, the rustling of breaths and roots joins the light, giving the ear and the eye the experience of a shared metamorphosis.

As words, breaths, roots, and light coalesce, the video installation La Noche Oscura de l’alma vegetal explores ways to inhabit this moving environment, where metamorphosis is not a temporary passage, but a way of being in the world.

Chapter 2 - The Vine

Prints developed with vine phenol
assembled in a Leporello, 60 x 1040 cm
Collaboration with researcher Eric Courot, philosopher Michael Marder, and composer Floriane Pochonn

Curator : Rozen Canevet

This iteration of La Nuit obscure de l’âme végétale unfolds as a weave of stories and materials. At its core lies a metamorphosis drawn from Chant XI of Nonnus of Panopolis: the slow transformation of a young man into a vine. Around it, other transformations take shape, those of the vine itself, of the nymph Leucothoe, and of the images, which come into being through vegetal chemistry. Each layer echoes the others, as if change were passing from body to plant, from plant to image.

In the foreground, a large glass balloon holds the vine-phenol developer. This amber liquid, once living matter, has become the very substance that allows the photographs to appear. The vine cells were cultivated upstream by the biochemist Éric Courot (Exebio, University of Reims),

A leporello more than ten meters long unfolds the photographs developed with this vegetal solution. Arranged like a constellation, the images invite the visitor to walk among them, and to experience the surface of the photograph as a living skin—marked by time, chemistry, and touch.

Chapter 3 - Twilight

Prints developed with peat phenol, 225 × 168 cm
Collaboration with philosopher Michael Marder

Curator : Rozen Canevet

In this third chapter, Twilight, the image emerges from the peat bog. A large triptych is created from a print developed with phenol extracted from the Sources du Bar peat bog.

At dusk, the silhouette of an auroch, the guardian of the bog, appears, caught in the moment when day yields to night. A metamorphosis, a passage from one state to another, accompanied by the act of photography.

Here, the material itself becomes developer, medium, and agent. Photography becomes an ecology in action - a way of inhabiting metamorphosis, of encountering the matter and beings of the peat bog.

Chapters 2 and 3 are the result of a partnership between the EKES research program at the ÉSAD de Reims and the EXEBIO Institute, the Argonne Rural Environmental Zone Atelier (ZARG), and the Center for Research and Training in Eco-Ethology (CERFE) at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne.