It was during a conference presenting my artistic practice, given during “Les Journées des Humanités Environnementales” in 2019 at the Magasin Centre National d’Art Contemporain in Grenoble, that a team of scientists noticed my stencil works. Following this meeting, Olivier Labussière, geographer and researcher at the CNRS Pacte laboratory, proposed a partnership, and the STRATES project was born in 2020. A group of researchers, including Olivier Labussière (Geographer), Laure Brayer (Architect) and Marc Higgin (Anthropologist), have been working alongside me for the duration of the project from 2020 to 2024, and together we are exploring the contemporary strata of the Grenoble Basin.

Teaser of the movie “Les Météores“, Laure Brayer, Olivier Labussière et Marc Higgin, 42min.

To better understand the process, the first step was to place a stencil in the landscape, consisting of a 1m2 (one square meter) Fermacell sheet bearing the digital image of a handprint printed on a vinyl sticker. For this image, I chose to reactivate and update the ancestral practice of the negative hand by digitizing it.

Digital photograph of one of the first landscape installations, 2021.

The three starting sites were chosen close to 3 atmospheric stations in the Grenoble area: Catania, École des Frênes and Saint Martin d’Hères.

For four weeks, we worked with the scientists to study each stencil in situ. The scientific analysis based on our on-board sensors – our eyes, ears, noses, etc. – was thus complemented by a visual survey using film. Video sequences were taken to capture the duration of the image’s formation, and wider shots, changing scale, were also taken to reflect the work’s interaction with the environment.

Next, we began comparing our perceptions with the results from the air stations to find the specific particles deposited on the stencil base.

The first 3 stencils enabled us to define particle types, I’d even say families, but not to identify their exact source. With the team, we went in search of the potential origins of each family member, exploring the area through three thematic axes we had selected. Next, I placed new stencils in each of the identified locations, using the same method as the initial stencil, but with an image of the new sites themselves. We were able to materialize 6 sites for each line.

As you can see above, the first line is that of human activities (human activities + agricultural practices + heating methods + means of transport + major metropolitan construction sites) // A demolition site for an urban bridge in the center of Grenoble, a motorway interchange at Rondeau, an industrial reservoir on the petrochemical platform at Pont-de-Claix, a construction waste quarry on the banks of the Drac, a drinking water catchment site where agricultural practices are carried out at Eaux ce Rochefort and a huge motorway viaduct at Col de Fau in Monestier de Clermont.

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Revealing a stencil with Tim Ingold

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What we call the second line is that of trees as participants in the atmosphere (through their pollens, leaves, etc.) // such as a Cedar, a Willow, a Lime, an Ash, a Beech and a Spruce, which are 6 endemic Belledonne species that we went to find on the slopes from Saint Martin d’Hères to Bachaboulou, located in the Chamrousse ski resort at 1450m.

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And finally, the third line, which is a little different from the others: cliffs as a device for observing the contemporary geological layer. In this line, we compare representations of mountain cliffs from Jean Achard in 1844 (Le Vercors, Musée de Grenoble, below) to the contemporary appearance of mountain cliffs today.

We also found some old photographs taken by Raymond de Bérenger in the 1850s!

To carry out our contemporary observations, we worked with a drone pilot, Chloé Devanne-Langlais, who is also an artist. Together, we depicted the cliffs of the Vercors using digital images. I then used them to create my works, which take the form of large reactive strips, again on Fermacell sheets… They capture the atmospheric nuances deposited on the images in the same way as on the cliffs, producing a sort of Panton effect.

The idea of this project is, to quote the American professor Donna Haraway, to “become with what happens to us”. Through this Arts-Sciences research, we’re trying to sharpen our gaze on the landscape that makes up the stratum of the Anthropocene era, to unfold our experience of the world, to better apprehend its future, to make ourselves sensitive to it. For us, this could only be a collective and welcoming challenge. That’s why each stencil unveiling is an opportunity to meet with local residents. We invite them to participate and discuss their own relationship with air. And in so doing, we connect with the specificities of the environment, but also with the people who live it.

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The “STRATES” project partners are :

L’Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR)

Le Labex ITTEM, Université Grenoble Alpes

Laboratoire PACTE, CRESSON et CNRS, Grenoble

Ecole Supérieure d’Art et de Design Grenoble-Valence

Festival Histoire de l’Art 2023 de Fontainebleau, (en partenariat avec l’ESAD-GV)

Musée de Grenoble / Connexion avec collection XIX e, Grenoble

Les CEMEA, Pont-de-Claix

École des Frênes de Villeneuve, Grenoble

Association, Les Jardins de la Poterne, SMH

Maison du Patrimoine et de l’Environnement, Chamrousse

Natura 2000, Revel

Musée Géo Charles, Échirolles

Association du Patrimoine de Saint-Martin-d’Uriage

Les Jardins de Malissoles, Varces

Association Médiarts, Grenoble

Series of digital photographs taken in the Grenoble metropolitan area.

For more information, please visit the dedicated website: Strates

In March 2018, I was invited to participate in an arts-sciences research project by Jennifer Buyck. At the time, she was an architect and urban planner at IUGA. Today, she still works as an architect and urban planner, but at Eiffel University in Paris.

At the crossroads of urban studies, environmental anthropology, literary analysis and artistic experimentation, the research project “Still on the Map! ” took as its framework the study of the Mississippi Delta, fifteen years after Hurricane Katrina, and some five years after the commissioning of a major new infrastructure to protect against the risk of a 100-year flood: Morganza to the Gulf (MTG) is a 158km Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk Reduction (HSDRR) project…

The research trip has been scheduled from January 29 to February 19, 2022 between New Orleans, the Achafalaya Basin, Lafayette, Morgan City, Cypremort Point, Houma, Venice and Baton Rouge in Louisiana, USA.

During this trip, with my colleague and friend Germain Meulemans, an anthropologist, we decided to meet some of the people interviewed by Frédéric Allamel for his book: “Eco-refugiés au pays des bayous. The Houma Indians in the Gulf of Mexico”. 2020.

As an artist, it seemed to me an easier way to meet people in Louisiana, to get in touch with other artists. And in doing so, to exchange with them about our specific relationship with landscapes, and our relationship with air in particular.

That’s how I met Roy Parfait and Ivy Billiot. They are two famous sculptors from the Houma community: “Carvers”. With Germain and two other colleagues, we were invited to discover their work in the place where they lived. Ivy lives with her brother in a working-class district of Houma.

Roy lives in Dulac with his sister. After Hurricane Ida, Roy’s house was totally destroyed. Since then, he’s been living in a mobile home right next door…

What struck me, when we talked with Roy about his house, was the way he projected himself into rebuilding it. I mean, he was projecting himself into rebuilding his house while knowing that in a few years, 2, 5 or 20 (nobody knows), another hurricane will surely hit again! It was as if Roy lived indefinitely between two hurricanes. This encounter with Roy led me to investigate all manifestations of the air during my trip to Louisiana. For me, photography is above all a masking process. You can focus on one part of reality with an image, and what you end up producing on a massive scale is the off-field. Through a process of accumulation, it’s then tempting to weave an imperfect, fragile web, a network, and thus speak of the “between”…

This is what inspired the “Hors Saison” project: it consists of a poem (below) and a series of 60 digital photographs in 52x70cm format.

Hors saison (2020 – 2022)

“Right in the heart of winter

In between two mosquito outbreaks

In between two humid and stifling heatwaves

How can one speak about the density of the air?

The thickness of the mud inside the house?

The wind rising once more?

The nine months of BP Horizon?

The passing hurricane?

The noise of engines?

The bereavement to come?

What can one experience in between two storms?

What relationship to air can be there ?“

Yves Monnier

Series of photographs taken between Baton Rouge, Le Bassin de l’Atchafalaya, Cypresmort Point, Venice, Grand Isle and La Nouvelle Orléans, USA, 2022

Pilotis (2020 – 2022)

For the series entitled “Pilotis”, I visited the University of Louisiana’s Museum of Rural Life. Then we went to Cypresmort Point. While there, I was surprised by the difference in size of the pilings compared to traditional buildings. Traditionally, pilings are built to a height of just one foot to protect houses from the dampness of the ground. But at Cypremort Point, I discovered houses built between 3 and 6.7 meters off the ground, or even more. One house in particular caught my eye.

In front of this house, lines have been drawn for each past hurricane, and the floor is now just above the last mark.

I couldn’t help but create a kind of personal fiction about how these houses were built. And in the back of my mind, I wondered: were they really built according to the waves and the strength of the wind? Of course, there are also purely practical questions about the enormous size of the stilts… And yet, as you know, today’s hurricanes are more violent than ever before.

So my question was: is this one of the reasons why these houses need to get bigger and bigger? At the time, for me, they were a kind of testimony to a specific relationship between humans and the natural elements.

Portrait of house taken between 3176 and 3865 Hwy 319 Cypremort Point, LA 70538, USA, 2022

Cyprès (2020 – 2022)

The “Cypres” series was born of the fact that a kind of moss or lichen had colonized the trunks of the trees, but had not colonized the part of the trunks that would be flooded during the high-water season. Thus, when I was in Anderson, I discovered cypress trunks with a dark zone extending 3 or 4 feet between the surface of the water and the beginning of the moss or lichen zone.

Once again, this materialized a very specific relationship with the air, but from the point of view of the moss or lichen’s needs…

Cypress portraits taken in HENDERSON, LA 70517, USA, 2022.

For more information, please visit the dedicated website: Still on the Map!

IIn the video work entitled Restaurer, I interviewed Lucille, Conservator at the George Pompidou Center, Paris. I asked her about taking into consideration the durability of materials used for artworks in contemporary collections, and the problems that this can raise in terms of restoration.

Yves Monnier:

– “From your point of view, is the durability of materials generally taken into account by artists today?”

– “Would you have one or more anecdotes on this subject?”

Extract 2’02min / Original 46’45 min / video / in collaboration with the director Clément Fessy / 2020

After initiating the project Les Vaches de Monsieur Yoshizawa in 2014, I looked for a way to expand the principle of written and photographic correspondence that I had established on that occasion. This is how the Mémoires Contemporaines project was born during a research and production residency at the l’Association Médiart in Grenoble from 2018 to 2019.

“What part of history, of our history, do we want to transmit? Each person who wishes to do so can share a part of his or her history through an image that is meaningful to them and whose preservation is important to them: a family image, a news image, an everyday image, a travel image, etc.”

Series of digital images from the exhibition Mémoires Contemporaines, L’Antichambre Galery, Chambéry, FRANCE, 2022.

I collected these images via the platform www.memoirescontemporaines.com, together with a few lines from each person in their mother tongue or in a chosen language, as a personal and meaningful testimony, a context. Each time an image arrives on the platform, the work of materialisation is done following the chronology of the files arrival; there is no selection criteria. I then substitute other materials for the screens that embody digital images in everyday life. These materials come from human and/or non-human activity, all having the common quality of being persistent in the environment, polluting or not, they mark the landscape durably: plastic, concrete, automotive body paint or marking paint, tar, gold. I use a vast variety of the types of artistic and production processes available today, from engraving, stencilling, silk-screening or even industrial digital printing and cutting. My idea is to discover these specific personal interests, the sensitivities of some, and of others, around the uses of photography today…I made a collection from these anonymous peoples’ images, as well as the individual’s criteria for selection and conservation.

Series of digital images from the Mémoires Contemporaines project 2018 – 2021.

Through the device of depositing vinyl stencils, I explore a new way of working. Rather than choosing the materials with which to embody the digital images myself (as in the small formats above), I have decided to use the stencil, but not to use it directly to materialise the work. Instead, it is the immediate environment that gives it its final form. The stencils are literally abandoned to their surrounds and over time the particles present in the air, in the water, from human and non-human activity slowly imbibe the base made of Fermacell board (a mixture of cellulose fibres and plaster).

Series of digital photographs taken during the unveiling of a stencil in Grenoble, France, 2018.

After a few weeks, a few months, when the stencil starts to peel off, I reveal the image by removing the sticker.

Series of digital images from the Mémoires Contemporaines project 2018 – 2021.

For more information, please visit the website dedicated to this project : www.memoirescontemporaines.com

This project is in partnership with Masami Yoshizawa, a farmer and survivor of the 11 March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster, and photographer Sayuri Arima.

Series of digital photographs taken at the Magasin des horizons, CNAC and at the Conciergerie in Grenoble, 2017.

The Cows of Mr. Yoshizawa

In 2011, when the Fukushima disaster occurred, I was preparing an exhibition at the Conciergerie in Savoie, France. This news inspired me to create the installation: Fukushima mon amour (2011). During the years that followed, I continued to find out about the people who had survived; I searched the Internet simply to keep myself informed. This is how, in 2014, I discovered the story of the Japanese farmer Masami Yoshizawa. He refused to be expropriated and to abandon his animals to starvation, or to kill them, as his government demanded. He chose to stay and live in the forbidden zone created after the disaster on the 11th March 2011 at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. He made this decision to maintain his own way of life, and to allow his animals to have a dignified end to their lives.

When I heard about Masami Yoshisawa’s story, I was moved by his gesture and tried to get in touch with him. I wrote to Mr. Yoshizawa and asked him if he would be willing to portrait each of his cows for me, based on a note I had sent him. My wish was to respond to his commitment by my own commitment to a work of memory. With the help of his friend, Sayuri Arima, a Japanese photographer, Mr. Yoshizawa accepted. We agreed that they would send me 1-2 portraits per week for the next 9-10 years so that I could produce (what I didn’t knew at this time…) the 350 portraits of Mr Yoshizwa cows.

Half of the profits from the sales of the original works, and the reproductions from the series Mr. Yoshizawa’s Cows (2014), are still donated to the Association La Ferme de L’Espoir.

Video / 10’02 min / in collaboration with the director Clément Fessy / 2018

Series of digital photographs taken at the Conciergerie in 2017.

For more information, please visit the website dedicated to this project : www.lesvachesdemonsieuryoshizawa.com