Picture rails in brushed cotton for the stands, a woman artist who climbs the glaciers naked… Art Paris stands out as the fair revolutionizing the ecological awareness of art fairs, claiming the first eco-design approach in the sector. At the heart of this 2022 edition is a reflection on how to organize the event differently, but also a desire to promote artists and works that take up the challenge of the ecological crisis. Until April 10 at the Grand Palais Éphémère in Paris.
In the cultural world, ecological change often remains very hesitant. Nevertheless, the Covid pandemic has shown how dependent culture is on mobility and energy. It is therefore not so surprising that major cultural events place climate change at the heart of their programme. The Cannes Film Festival had opened the ball. In July 2021, the biggest cinema meeting in the world launched its action Cinema for the climate and promised to completely rethink the way of producing the Festival “. Last September, the first edition of the Biennale Photoclimat undertook to revolutionize the way of doing exhibitions. Today, Art Paris stands out among art fairs as a pioneer in the field of the environment: ” Our eco-design approach is a first in the world of art fairs. »
Carpet, picture rails, bottles, cars, Internet page…
This ecological desire is available on different levels: more paper programs, digitized catalogs, recycled and recyclable PVC badges. Like the red carpet that has become eco-responsible in Cannes, Art Paris has announced that it will use a carpet that will be 100% recycled afterwards as a combustible material. And the 2.5 tonnes of scraped cotton covering the picture rails will be used after April 10 in the form of insulating material in the building sector. Of course, no more plastic water bottles will be sold or distributed at the Grand Palais Ephémère and the fleet of official cars is completely electric to transport the VIPs of the fair in all ecological conscience. Even the home page of the Art Paris site has been redesigned to divide the production of CO2 by three, from 19.31 g in October 2021, the score is now down to 6.50 g of CO2.
Of course, not everything is perfect yet. Far from there. For example, the square in front of the entrance to the Grand Palais Éphémère has been transformed into a luxury showcase for a sports car designed to be propelled by its 300 hp in 4.2 s from 0 to 100 km/h while promising maximum of 275 km/h. An appeal to the reflexes of the Old World which not only comes into total contradiction with the giant and eco-responsible architecture of the Grand Palais Éphémère, but above all with the ecological desire of this “Art and Environment” edition of Art Paris. And that’s not the only inconsistency.
Life cycle analysis (LCA) vs carbon balance
The organizers of the fair are good at pointing out that their approach to eco-design through a life cycle analysis (LCA) is more successful than a simple carbon footprint and single criterion (greenhouse gas). Indeed, eco-design makes it possible to calculate and therefore to ” reduce the environmental impacts of a product or service from the extraction of raw materials to its disposal at the end of its life “. But, at the same time, Art Paris admits that the ACV ” does not take into account the impacts of visitors or exhibitors “. However, it is precisely the hypermobility of visitors, gallery owners and exhibitors from all over the world that generally generates more than 74% of the carbon pollution of art fairs, according to a study published in December 2021 in the Shift Project report, Let’s decarbonize culture. In 2019, the last edition before the Covid pandemic, Art Paris welcomed 150 galleries from 20 countries and 63,257 visitors. This year, foreign participation stands at 37% among the 130 exhibitors from 23 countries. Without taking these figures into account, the ecological comparison with other still much more international fairs such as the Fiac (200 galleries from 29 countries in 2019, but which became Paris+ in 2022) in Paris or the Frieze Art Fair (165 galleries from 35 countries in 2019) in London will obviously be very difficult.
Art and the environment, labels for works or a way of life for artists
On the artist side, where the world of cinema is seriously thinking about introducing criteria concerning the carbon footprint of each film, in the field of art, so far, everyone seems to be content with individual will and judgment. At Art Paris, no work presented displays its carbon footprint or a life cycle analysis. The “Art and Environment” label, affixed next to the 17 selected works, is content with a short description of the work and a brief biography of the artist.
At the same time, many pieces convey a desire to no longer serve as an illustrated alibi for an announced climatic catastrophe. The concern for nature and the environment is often shown in a less obvious way than before in the works, but much more asserted in the biographies of the artists. ” Ecology is not a work theme for them, but their relationship to the world says Alice Audouin, founder of the Art of Change 21 association and responsible for selecting the 17 artists for the “Art and Environment” section.
Naked bodies, leaves and cells…
Among these artists, the French Sarah Trouche, thirty-eight, is the only one to transform her works into an ecological manifesto. Resolutely committed, her fist raised, she puts her naked body at the heart of her art and thus climbs on a glacier on the island of Svalbard by -20°C to warn of the melting ice: Scream because he who is dying is silent. A courage that each buyer of this spectacular photograph can reward up to 4,500 euros (Marguerite Milin gallery).
Opposed to this very expressive approach is the intimate work of Pia Rönicke. The Dane, born in 1974, endowed with a weakness for botany, merges poetry and politics, the leaves of a plant and the pages of a book in her exhibited work. This mini-installation (offered at 3,300 euros by the gb agency gallery) of a dried plant draped over verses by the Syrian poet Adonis (Pages of Day and Night), silently but poignantly recounts the drama and terror in Syria. To save the Lathyrus pratensis plant from extinction following the bombardments, seeds were exfiltrated at the start of the war to be reintroduced today on Syrian soil. An artistic act to link the massacre of human beings to the massacres of nature.
Far from the highways of thought is also the Russian collective Recycle Groupe. Exhibited by the Suzanne Tarasièv gallery, Andrey Blokhin, born in 1987, and Georgy Kuznetsov, born in 1985, claim both the recycling of materials and the recycling of art history. For them, ” global warming and the digital world are the two hyper-phenomena that humans must manage to control if they want to safeguard their conditions of existence and freedom. At Art Paris, they invite us to plunge our gaze into a sculpted tableau of ocean blue depth (the tariff depth is fixed at 16,000 euros) based on a virtuoso architecture referring to the wax cells built by bees, some of which species, as we know, are threatened with extinction.
Be consistent between his life as an artist and his work
As for the French artist Vincent Laval, a wood technician trained at the École Boulle, he defines himself as an “artist-walker-gatherer”. Born in 1991, he grew up on the edge of the Carnelle forest in the north of Ile-de-France and admits to being viscerally driven by nature. His astonishing wood carvings or his circle of bark held by a fiery red strap (Galerie Sono, 7,000 euros) send us back to the archetypes of our lives. Beyond artistic beauty, his work requires above all ” a great coherence between his way of inhabiting the world and creating “.
Romuald Hazoumé, born in 1962 and now world famous with his sculptures of jerry cans, the Beninese artist even refuses to be categorized as a recycling artist, so that the global and political message of his works is not limited to the dimension ecological. At Art Paris, his pyramid of plastic containers is offered by Galerie Magnin-A at 316,000 euros.
Radiology of a seriously ill
Of course, the wave of the ecological movement is not limited to the artists selected in the “Art and Environment” section. This year, it is even striking to what extent the majority of the 900 artists represented at Art Paris are inspired or concerned by nature or ecological issues. Take the example of David Décamp, born in 1970 in the Jura forest. This artist-lumberjack transmits to us visceral sensations of the microcosm and macrocosm and its disappearance of species. Exhibited by the Galerie La Forest Divonne, the culmination of his magnificent work, with evocative titles such as Dead wood, undergrowth Where Stations of the Cross without crosses, consists of a radiology box examining tree trunks. Here we are catapulted into consultation, looking at the radio of a seriously ill patient.
If you prefer to laugh at it, two green garbage dumpsters with holes and superimposed on a white concrete base offer you an escape for 28,000 euros. With these polyethylene bins transformed in 2021 into plastic art, the French sculptor Anita Molinero, born in Floirac in 1953, manages to turn our gaze towards what we do not normally want to see. And she reminds us that everything is good to build a better world.
► Art Paris, from April 7 to 10, at the Grand Palais Ephémère in Paris.