Sol fictions

In their work, Marie Ouazzani & Nicolas Carrier (born in 1991 and 1981, respectively, live and work in Paris) survey the urban wastelands of, among other things, major metropolitan developments, infusing plants with evocative names and creating climatic fictions. Shifting between weariness, hope, and irony, the artistic duo are witness to the escalating environmental crisis and potential new interspecies collaborations.  

Employing various formats, the exhibition Sol fictions presents spaces that are at once “haunted by pollution”, refuges of silent plant species, and vestiges of urban utopias created by the architects and town planners of the 1960s and 1970s. In late summer 2022, Marie Ouazzani & Nicolas Carrier filmed a fiction in several places in the north-east of Paris: Noisy-le-Sec (municipal greenhouses, wastelands in the Merlan area), Bobigny (La Prairie du Canal) and an underground farm in the capital’s 18th arrondissement. Shown in La Galerie alongside photographs, maps and installations, the film tells the story of the ground, the surface on which species – human, vegetable, animal – survive, propagate, help each other and sometimes fall. In the indeterminate temporality of this panorama, we are able to fathom the impact of climate change on the bodies and the capacity of living beings to resist. In the image, perhaps, Tradescantia pallida – commonly known as purple heart – which invades this exhibition and whose ability to acclimatise to environments under stress suggests new ways of living on the Earth.