Refuge artworks

Refuge artworks

 

 

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Earthly and shifting poems taking the form of shelters

 

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Œuvres-refuges is a research and creation project conducted in partnership with the LPO (League for the Protection of Birds) and supported by the Île-de-France Region. This project is part of the 2026 Nuits des forêts program.
Designed for the Domaine de Villarceaux, it lies at the crossroads of art, ecology and heritage, and questions how a work can become simultaneously a sculpture, a refuge and a place of cohabitation between forms of life.

 

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An art of landscape and relationship

 

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This residency extends a deep desire: to create a work that is not only in the landscape, but with it.
Each intervention is rooted in natural cycles, in a concrete attention to the territory and its inhabitants, human or non-human.
In collaboration with the LPO, the project relies on the perspective and knowledge of naturalists so that each work meets the ecological needs of the place.
Art here becomes a way of inhabiting the world, a way of reconnecting with life through form and matter.

 

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Shelters between earth, fire and life

 

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The refuge artworks take the form of hybrid structures, somewhere between land art and living architecture.
They are made from locally sourced materials — clays, wood species, earth — and combine fired ceramics, raw earth and plant elements.
Some rise up as shelters for birds, others take root in the earth, offering micro-habitats.
Through them, art becomes a gesture of hospitality, a way of uniting the hand of the artist with the ingenuity of life.

 

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A living memory of the process

 

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Each stage of the residency — observation, collection, dialogues, experiments — will be documented in research notebooks and shared archives.
These traces, guardians of the project's memory, will allow the approach to shine beyond the time of creation, and to inspire other initiatives where art and science work together for the preservation of life.

 

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Mediation and transmission

 

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Because creation finds its meaning in sharing, the project is accompanied by mediation work carried out with the LPO, La Source Garouste and the Domaine de Villarceaux.
Workshops, meetings and collective experiences invite the public to experience the beauty of life, to observe, build and reflect together.
The artwork becomes a shared space, a place for dialogue and awakening.

 

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Towards a poetic ecology

 

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By placing creation at the service of life, Œuvres-refuges seeks to reconnect with an ancient yet urgent idea:
that of a total art, where knowledge, sensitivity and care come together to give new meaning to the word common world.
It is a laboratory of attention and transformation, where the earth becomes language, refuge and promise.