Bringing together a community of artists, botanists, and philosophers, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain echoes the latest scientific research that sheds new light on trees. The exhibition “We The Trees” can be seen in Paris until 10 November 2019.

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News of forest clearances reporting alarming figures of millions of hectares are increasingly common. On top of that, fires turn vast forest areas to dust within days. The number of trees that get cut down worldwide is larger than those that grow back. However, forests with trees that are often hundreds of years old are tremendously important for humans. They supply the oxygen we breathe and absorb the carbon dioxide we produce.

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The appreciation of the tree

The exhibition “We the trees” at the Fondation Cartier in Paris focuses on the importance of trees and their essential meaning for humans by making them the central theme of the exhibition. The special features, ingenuity and biological world of these fantastic living organisms is emphasised through various media. The focus is on the relationship between humans and trees.

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Individual expression

The exhibition consists of a compilation of individual works by different artists. The artists express the meaning of trees in specific ways through films, photographs, sound installations, scientific illustrations, documentaries and paintings. Botanist Stefano Manusco, for instance, created a sound installation together with Thijs Biersteker to showcase the environment’s effects on trees. The artists furthermore disclose trees’ hidden abilities and make them audible and visible through their installation.

In the drawings by the botanist Francis Hallé, art and scientific precision blend together to create a new, informative and yet fascinating work of art. Films by Raymond Depardon as well as Paz Encina centre on the relationship between humans and trees.

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On a scientific, biological and artistic level, the complex exhibition indicates that trees are meaningful not only for the environment, but also for technology. It demonstrates the beauty and aesthetics of trees and draws attention to current events and devastation threatening trees.

The Eiffel Tower is to get new surroundings. The tourist attraction and landmark of Paris draws several millions of visitors every year and is struggling with the tourist volume: the infrastructure of the area is just not designed for it. This is why the city set a competition for its redesign. Now a winner has been chosen.

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London-based landscape designers Gustafson Porter + Bowman won the competition for the redesign of of the area around the Eiffel Tower. This includes the Trocadéro gardens as well as the Champ de Mars, the tower itself and its promenade.

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The design by Gustafson Porter + Bowman allows for more pedestrian space and reduces traffic around the Eiffel Tower. Instead, better connections to public transport are to help visitors getting to the sight without causing an increased traffic load. This way, the landscape designers do their bit to help reaching the goals of the Paris Agreement by creating a “green lung” for the city. For this, they want to close the Pont d’Iéna to motor traffic.

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Public Participation

The Parisians have a say in the revitalization of their most important landmark, too: the winning team is holding a one-month exhibition to present its design to the public which is invited to express opinions and to give feedback. Gustafson Porter + Bowman will then include these ideas in their design.

The city is a matrix that cannot be apprehended in its entirety at once. You cannot visit more than one place at a time. Circumventing this limitation, the French architect and photographer Jérémie Dru found a way to perceive the city – in his case Paris, his hometown – from more than just one point of view. He freezes the city’s moments and overlays them. By that, Dru puts the observer between two places and into a dimension where time and space seem to have no meaning at all.

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In the current copy of Topos – Time, Jérémie Dru shows his art work “Un voyageur incertain”. As a photographer, he practices with the intuition that there are elusive realities intrinsic to the city. One of the oldest conceptions of the city, one by which civilization has sought to explain itself to itself, is to see it as a reduction of the cosmos to the human scale. Thus he explores the urban space in search of those faces that are imperceptible to our eyes, as did the artists of surrealism or the New Vision in the early twentieth century. They considered the analogue camera as a way to perfect and complete our eyes. In his book Peinture, photographie, film et autres écrits sur la photographie, László Moholy-Nagy says: “The camera leads us to truths that we cannot see with our eyes, which cannot be observed and become visible with the camera.” Photography, in other words, gives us access to truths that cannot be perceived relying on the perceptual apparatus of the human body alone.

Transforming the space

His approach consists not only in overprinting two images, but in confusing the lines and vanishing points that compose them. The two images become inseparable from one another, and they are governed by one perspective. In this way, the architecture of the place is transformed. By folding architectural lines on themselves, they recompose urban spaces-times with multiple properties, sometimes paradoxical. A ceiling can be the sky, the mineral can also be vegetal. The architecture of the places deceives the traveller, and the city takes on aspects of a labyrinth. Photography makes it possible to build worlds on the border between fiction and reality. It shows the hidden complexity of the world and the cosmos, inscribed in the city and in architecture.

Vita

Jérémie Dru is an architect with a passion for photography. He started research into the perception of urban spaces on completing his studies at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture in Paris in 2012. Find more of his work here: http://jeremiedru.com

You find the whole article “A City close up” by Jérémie Dru the 100th copy of Topos Magazine!