Life forms

7

Many life forms co-exist in ‘le Grand Paris’: urban, rural, vegetable, aquatic, mineral, animal… In the midst of environmental urgency, the continuing construction of metropolitan Paris is confronting its balance with Nature, with the preservation of its ecosystem. Photographers examined these tensions, sometimes by looking backward, looking for traces left by past lives, in sedimentation, fossils, aquatic flows, constellations, rocks, forests — or in the documentation of the repetition of ancient movements, such as harvesting. Other artists featured details which are often ignored in an urban, artificial milieu: a little square, community gardens, or the odd presence of parakeets. Attention is also paid to natural spaces which may be disappearing, threatened by all the construction and new infrastructures, or those which are coming back to life, for example in reforestation projects. Between bucolic landscapes, romantic impulses and scientific inventories, the photographic series carries the hope of a new harmony for a territory which remains ambiguous because of the different components and of the people living there.

Associated perspective
Emanuele Coccia, philosopher