The context

This project was born from the desire of the Departmental Committee for the Protection of Nature and the Environment, manager of the national nature reserve of the Grand-Pierre and Vitain valleys, to introduce an artistic dimension into its development and enhancement.

In conjunction with the Marolles Nature House, the reserve supports an environmental awareness and education activity, mainly aimed at young people.

The commission

In collaboration with the CDPNE's educational and awareness-raising mission, Michel Blazy proposes a series of elements made of terracotta that are spread over the reserve's path, the offering tables, and arrange the reception and information area, the garden of dead potted plants. These installations as well as biodegradable mobile beaconing are designed for participatory use by encouraging active appropriation by residents of neighbouring municipalities, schoolchildren or any other visitor. They raise the question of natural cycles beyond superficial assessments of life and death, the fragile balances between species or the metamorphoses that human action can cause.

Michel Blazy

Michel Blazy, born in 1966 in Monaco, lives and works on the Ile Saint-Denis. He creates ephemeral and living installations from the most humble and derisory materials of our daily life, whose transformation processes and random mutations he generates and highlights. Organic and food materials, all those that accompany our daily lives, become sculptures and installations to be contemplated, and no longer to be consumed. The artist highlights the transitional states, mutations, decompositions and perpetual rebirths of matter at the passing of time.