Art Beyond the Gallery
Out of the White Cube
Des sculptures déposées dans les interstices de la ville. Chaque point localise un endroit où le vivant fait quelque chose d’inattendu, sans notre autorisation, sans notre regard. Explorez la carte. Allez voir.
The City as Living Territory
There is no longer any untouched nature. The forest, the countryside, rural land, the city — these are all biotopes shaped by human intervention to varying degrees. In each one, life takes hold, transforms itself, adapts without our permission. Setting the city against the forest already means ranking spaces of nature before even looking at what happens within them.
In Nantes, Laurent Godet (CNRS, Nantes Université) observes birds modifying their song according to street lighting. Audrey Muratet documents an urban-loving flora colonising wasteland. The common Pipistrelle hunts insects drawn to streetlamps, turning the city into a hunting ground. The city presented as an ecological disaster becomes, in its blind spots, the stage for forms of resilience that science is only beginning to document.
Out of the White Cube starts from this observation. Each sculpture placed in urban interstices marks a spot where this invisible life does something unexpected, without our permission, away from all eyes.
Seeing Differently Is a Necessary Act
The discourse of ecological urgency, legitimate as it is, directs the gaze before observation. It makes other ways of seeing the living world — and ourselves — more difficult. Paul Feyerabend argued that no single method monopolises knowledge of reality. Bruno Latour showed how scientific facts are constructed within human and social contexts. Baptiste Morizot, philosopher of the living, writes that we do not regenerate life — we awaken its autonomous powers of regeneration.
Before becoming a sculptor, I worked as a laboratory technician at IFREMER. I observed from the inside how knowledge is built, and what it cannot say alone. The city is also a living territory in transformation. Seeing it differently is a necessary act — one that reconnects us to the living world we have never truly left.
Out of the White Cube is that proposition. Not to contradict science, but to embody what it leaves in the shadows.
A Map Born from Lockdown
2020. Emerging from lockdown feels like a re-emergence. Going back into the streets, seeing the world — not as before, but differently.
Eyes recalibrated by weeks spent indoors, the gaze catches what it had stopped seeing: a crack in the concrete colonised by moss, an abandoned riverbank returned to forest, a wall where vegetation has begun to dismantle itself, stone by stone, in silence.
Out of the White Cube was born from this moment. Not as a planned project, but as a necessity. Taking sculptures down into the city. Placing them where resilient nature has already claimed the space, without asking permission. Each deposit becomes a signal, a physical marker on a living territory that no one looks at.
The map that accompanies this project is not a navigation tool. It is an evolving digital imprint on the territory. An open memory of a practice that will grow through future interventions, in Nantes, in Paris, and beyond. Each documented point carries its photographs, its text, its coordinates. A geolocated corpus of life in transformation, accessible to all, at eye level.
Lockdown showed that life does not wait. This map is its reflection.
