“Once again, today was a day of indescribable, unimaginable beauty. […] I lay in my wicker chair, my head tilted back and gazed motionless at the sky for hours. Immense clouds in fantastical shapes rose on every side against the pale pastel blue of the sky, shimmering through their ragged contours. Sunlight edged them in dazzling white, while at their centre stretched an expressive grey that played across every shade, from the most delicate silver veil to the darkest stormy hues. Have you ever noticed how beautiful and rich a colour grey is? There is something noble and restrained about it, and it holds so many possibilities. And how marvellous those grey tones were against the pastel-blue sky! They matched like a grey dress and deep-blue eyes. Meanwhile, the great poplar in the garden rustled before me; its leaves trembled as though seized by a voluptuous shiver and sparkled in the sun. During those few hours, entirely immersed in reveries of grey and blue, I felt as though I had lived for millennia.”

Rosa Luxemburg wrote these words on 6 July 1917 from Wronke Fortress, where she was imprisoned for her opposition to the war. Between 1915 and 1918, she spent some of the most dramatic years in European history almost continuously behind bars. Yet alongside political news, clouds, plants, birds, insects, poetry and music recur throughout the letters she wrote during this period. Luxemburg marvels at the traces of a prehistoric downpour fossilised in stone, imitates the calls of tits from her cell and kneels to warm frost-stiffened bumblebees with her breath. What might at first seem like mere digressions reveals, on closer inspection, the same desire to understand the world and to remain open to being touched by it: “I feel at home throughout the entire world, wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.”

Drawing: ©Anaëlle Clot.

Even in prison, Luxemburg found ways to continue working on her herbarium: of the seventeen notebooks that make up the collection, seven were produced, at least in part, during her detention. More than a scientific herbarium, it is an intimate, personal collection of flowers, leaves and small branches that she gathered herself or received from outside, accompanied by dates, places and, occasionally, the names of those who had managed to send them behind bars. Missing petals and stems are sometimes delicately completed in pencil.

At the very moment when the world was “coming off its hinges”, Luxemburg laid claim to everything that continued to bring her joy: “music and painting and clouds and botanising in spring and good books and Mimi [her cat, ed.] and you and many other things besides—in short, I am rich a million times over and intend to remain so until the end.” What she found unbearable, by contrast, was to “allow oneself to be entirely consumed by the misery of the day”. She urged her fellow activists to cultivate “a universality of interests, an inner harmony”: the ability not to let any single dimension of existence devour all the others. This was not a matter of seeking refuge in beauty as a means of turning away from the violence of history. On the contrary, there is something profoundly radical in this stance: a refusal to grant violence the power to determine, on its own, what is worthy of our attention.

Faced with the clouds of Wronke, only one thing tormented her: having to “enjoy so much beauty alone”. To the friend to whom the letter was addressed—and, across time, to all of us—she continued:

“I want to call out over the wall: please, pay attention to this magnificent day! Do not forget, however busy you may be, even if you are crossing the courtyard in haste, absorbed in your urgent tasks—do not forget to lift your head for a moment and glance at these immense silver clouds and the peaceful blue ocean in which they are floating. Pay attention to this air, filled with the passionate breath of the last linden blossoms, to the radiance and splendour of this day, because this day will never, ever return! It has been given to you like an open rose at your feet, waiting for you to pick it up and press it to your lips.”

We interviewed Daniel Zamarbide, one of the key figures of BUREAU, a collective founded with Carine Pimenta and Galliane Zamarbide. Situated at the intersection of architecture, design and research, BUREAU develops a critical and immersive approach to space. As a member of the co-creative team behind the project Meeting on the Threshold, the collective explores, in particular, the relationships between public space, ephemeral interventions and contemporary transformations.

One of your axes of research concerns public space, a notion that encompasses a wide range of realities.
Traditionally, for architects and landscape designers, public space corresponds to the organisation of “voids”, the negative of the built environment, i.e. squares, parks or streets.

Your approach, however, extends beyond this definition.
Yes, we’re particularly interested in all that pertains to the ephemeral, a field in which we have long been engaged. This includes temporary installations, as well as interventions within festivals and other events that physically and concretely occupy public space. We also incorporate into this expanded understanding of public space everything relating to scenography and exhibition design: dispositifs that do not respond to a single commissioner or a fixed programme, but are conceived to host diverse audiences, often within the context of artistic or cultural events.

How much attention is currently given to the design of public space?
Public space is, in a sense, regarded as the “poor relation” of architecture and urbanism. There are moments when it acquires a certain prestige, for instance in the creation of large-scale parks, but, more often than not, it remains secondary. This is reflected very concretely in the budgets allocated to it, which are significantly lower than those devoted to infrastructure or buildings.

Why this disparity in consideration?
Because it is perceived as a non-productive space: public space doesn’t directly generate economic value. Housing, offices, even schools participate, in one way or another, in an economy. Public space, by contrast, doesn’t produce profit. It is for this reason that, for a time—up until around the 2000s—shopping centres were regarded as innovative forms of public squares, precisely because they generate revenue.

And now?
Over the past twenty years, there has been a significant rise in the temporary occupation of public space. It’s no coincidence that events such as the Venice Biennale, Art Basel or far more popular phenomena like food truck festivals have come to occupy public space on a large scale. One might read this as a desire—more or less conscious, more or less elitist or popular—to transform the city through means other than permanent intervention.

How do you account for the success of the ephemeral in contrast to more enduring projects?
Permanent interventions are bound up with weighty, often technocratic processes, marked by considerable inertia: protracted procedures, political entanglements, and reliance on substantial budgets. By contrast, ephemeral interventions have the capacity to transform the city with remarkable intensity, sometimes within the space of a single day, before disappearing altogether. This is what interests me: the possibility of acting swiftly, of generating sensory and collective effects without being tied to permanence.

In what ways have these dynamics of the ephemeral influenced contemporary urban practices?
Today, we speak of “tactical urbanism”, which draws directly on these logics: before implementing a permanent development, one tests the ground through temporary interventions, over the course of one or two years. This is also what we’re doing, for instance, with least in Champ-Fréchets for the Meeting on the Threshold project: testing, observing and adjusting.

This focus on the ephemeral nonetheless raises critical questions, particularly ecological ones.
Of course. Yet, over the long term, such interventions may prove less impactful than certain permanent transformations of public space as they are currently conceived. I see this approach from two angles. On the one hand, it’s highly compelling: it enables experimentation, openness and even a form of resistance to the rigidity of traditional processes. On the other, it can also become a kind of “ruse”. Because these interventions are less costly, some administrations use them to ease their conscience: they stage temporary actions, speak the language of participation and then go on to implement a project that has already been decided.

So there’s both genuine value and a risk of co-option?
More broadly, I think there’s a fundamental problem of temporality within urbanism. Procedures are extremely slow, while social transformations are increasingly rapid. It’s almost impossible for a project that is conceived now to genuinely respond to needs fifteen or twenty years down the line. And yet, these are precisely the timeframes required for its realisation. Over such a duration, needs, uses and expectations may shift entirely. Therefore, there’s a profound disjunction between administrative temporalities and social transformations, particularly in relation to issues such as climate change and the living world.

Drawing: ©Anaëlle Clot.

In this context, does your practice develop specific strategies to engage with this complexity—uses, human presence, but also other forms of life?
For a long time—and this is still often the case today—public space was heavily mineralised. This responds to a logic of control: the more mineral a space, the easier it is to regulate. It’s an almost hygienist logic, i.e. controlling uses, but also the living—plants, animals, micro-organisms—which are considered difficult to manage. The living entails maintenance, uncertainty and complexity.
For our part, we seek to conceive public space not solely from a human perspective, but as an environment shared among multiple forms of life. These questions are central to our pedagogical practice, where we endeavour, in particular, not to confine ourselves to a purely visual approach. This has a compelling impact, especially among younger architects and designers.

You work in very different contexts, in both Switzerland and Portugal. Does your practice include forms of collaboration with local communities?
We’re increasingly trying to develop what might be simply described as a form of immersion. We seek to spend more time on site, to observe, to understand uses, to carve out time, within often constrained processes, to be genuinely present in places and with the people who inhabit them. This type of approach is common in sociology or anthropology but remains relatively marginal within architecture and urbanism.

In your view, what have been the most significant shifts in the perception of public space in recent years?
I don’t have a definitive, overarching answer, but there’s a recent period that strikes me as particularly revealing: that of Covid. As many have observed, it functioned as a kind of large-scale laboratory of the future, for better and for worse.
What struck me most was the sudden importance of micro-situations in everyday life: the simple act of walking, the impromptu apéritif, relations with neighbours. Thresholds—balconies, doorways, in-between spaces linking interior and exterior—became essential.
Conversely, domestic space revealed itself to be deeply problematic for many. We know that during this period, domestic violence and feminicide increased. This demonstrates that such issues aren’t only social or cultural, but also spatial. The possibility of stepping outside, of accessing intermediate spaces, is fundamental, particularly in relation to dynamics of control often structured by gender.
At the same time, there was a kind of “return” of the living: animals reappeared in cities, vegetation developed differently, notably due to the reduction in traffic and pollution. All of this contributed to restoring the importance of outdoor space.
Yet, once the crisis had passed, a form of collective amnesia set in. Administrative systems resumed their usual rhythms, and these lessons have struggled to translate into lasting transformations.
This is precisely where art and ephemeral interventions become essential: they allow for the rapid testing of new ideas and sensibilities. The “consciousness” of Covid, for instance, found far easier expression through temporary dispositifs than through permanent projects. It’s within this perspective that we’re currently working, notably in Meyrin: intervening in sites that are sometimes invisible, addressing climatic, social and functional questions through light, experimental structures.

Is there a guiding principle in your practice that you would particularly wish to transmit?
For the past fifteen years or so, the idea of deconstruction has stayed with me. It is much discussed today in relation to questions of gender, but I believe it has wider application across many fields, including architecture and its colonial dimensions. It involves recognising that our perceptions are never neutral; they are constructed, situated and transmitted within specific contexts. As such, they must be questioned: who defined them, why, and at what point in time? This critical stance seems to me essential today. The term “deconstruction” is especially compelling in that it resonates directly with our profession: to build, but also to unbuild—both materially and culturally. In this sense, it aligns closely with the idea of the ephemeral: both point to processes, transformations and states that resist being fixed.

An art lover enters a museum. It is not his first visit, yet each time still feels exceptional. In Europe, public museums are still rare, and his profession as a physician leaves him little time to devote to his most cherished pastime. He sits on a bench before the painting he has chosen to study and remains there for a long while, silent, observing. Over the years, he has developed a personal discipline of attention, a technique of memory that allows him to preserve in his mind what he will soon have to leave behind. There is something cruel about the passion for art: once you step away from a work, you can rely only on your memories or on imperfect reproductions engraved and printed in black and white by some copyist.
 
After a while, he takes out his notebook and begins to draw; not the whole scene, but the details of the bodies depicted in the painting: the conch and lobe of the ears, the outline of the nails, the shape of the feet. At first, he had taken up this exercise out of professional habit, guided by the anatomical curiosity of a man accustomed to observing the diversity of human bodies. Over time, however, by copying and recopying these particular features, he has arrived at a singular conviction: to recognise the hand of a painter, one should not look so much at the overall style or the palette—which can be imitated—but at those details executed almost absentmindedly, with a quick gesture, less constrained by convention and closer to the artist’s individuality. It is a method of recognition akin to that used in clinical medicine, which must often rely on the fragmentation of symptoms in order to infer the underlying disease.
 
We are in the nineteenth century. The man seated before the painting is named Giovanni Morelli and he does not yet know that, a few decades later, the method he is slowly developing will influence not only the history of art but other fields of knowledge as well. Sigmund Freud himself would later recognise something strangely familiar in the approach of this great connoisseur and would write: “Psychoanalysis proceeds in the same way: it attaches particular importance to what appears insignificant, to the refuse and debris of observation, in order to discover secret or concealed things.” Indeed, in psychoanalytic practice, truth does not reveal itself in the most coherent and carefully organised speeches, but in the deviations: a slip of the tongue, an apparently secondary detail, a contradiction in the narrative. The analyst attends to what seems marginal, because it is precisely in these fissures that something may emerge that escapes conscious control.
 
A few centuries earlier, in Venice, a tale of Persian origin is printed: The Three Princes of Serendip. The story recounts the journey of three young princes who encounter a man distraught over the loss of his camel. Before he even has time to explain, the three princes begin asking him a series of astonishingly precise questions. Was the camel, they ask, perhaps blind in one eye? Was it, by chance, lame? Did it carry butter on one side and honey on the other? And had it not been ridden by a pregnant woman?
 
Troubled by such precision, the man concludes that the three must have stolen the animal and openly accuses them. Cornered, the princes explain that not only have they not stolen it, but they have never even seen it. Along the road, they say, they simply noticed certain details: the grass had been grazed only on the poorer side of the path, suggesting that the animal could see out of only one eye. One of the tracks, dragged through the sand, indicated an injured leg. Farther along, the insects gathering revealed that butter had leaked from one side of the load, attracting ants, while honey dripping from the other side had drawn flies. Finally, near the spot where someone had stopped to urinate, handprints could be seen in the soil: a sign that the person who stood up had needed to push themselves up with both hands—something that might happen to a pregnant woman.

Drawing: © Anaëlle Clot

Finally, one last and very long leap back in time. A person walks slowly across a muddy plain under a light rain. They are not looking into the distance, as someone trying to orient themselves in the landscape might do; their gaze remains fixed on the ground. At first glance, the terrain appears uniform. But it takes only a moment of bending down and paying close attention to realise that it is anything but: the brown surface is dotted with fresh, deep footprints leading toward a grove of birch trees. Here and there, blades of grass lie flattened, tufts of hair cling to the low branches of bushes. A little farther on, a few still-warm droppings slowly dissolve into the mud. An animal passed through here not long ago. It walked with a heavy step, perhaps tired from the hunt and the meal that followed. Perhaps it is now hiding in the grove, where among the trees there is a pond to drink from and thickets in which to take shelter. Night will soon fall. It would be wiser to keep one’s distance.

What unites these episodes scattered across time—episodes to which the historian Carlo Ginzburg alludes in his essay Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm—is the same mental operation. In each case, someone finds themselves confronted with a reality that cannot be observed directly and must be reconstructed from clues: a minor detail in a painting, something that catches the eye along the edge of a road, a slip of the tongue in a conversation, footprints in the mud. The event itself is no longer present, yet it has left behind a series of scattered signs. The work of knowledge consists precisely in connecting them, patiently, until plausible patterns begin to emerge, much like a detective in a crime novel.

Drawing on examples such as these, Ginzburg proposed recognising the existence of a particular form of knowledge that cuts across very different disciplines, which he called the “evidential paradigm”. It is a way of knowing that proceeds less through general laws or abstract demonstrations than through the interpretation of clues—tiny, marginal signs that, if observed with sufficient attention, allow one to trace back to a broader reality. In this kind of knowledge, what appears individual or singular is not a residue to be eliminated in order to reach a more stable generalisation. On the contrary, it is the very point from which knowledge—situated knowledge—takes its momentum. This amounts to a genuine epistemological revolution: to consider the unrepeatable as the very condition that makes interpretation possible overturns a long tradition of scientific thought that sought, instead, to ground knowledge in the elimination of the particular.

In the 1970s, it was precisely around this intuition that what came to be called microhistory began to develop in Europe. Figures such as Ginzburg, Giovanni Levi and Carlo Poni proposed complementing the great structural syntheses of historical scholarship with close attention to marginal subjects: the community of a village, a judicial trial, the trajectory of a particular individual. The term micro does not so much refer to the size of the object of study as to a change in the scale of observation: looking closely makes it possible to perceive tensions, practices and forms of experience that remain invisible when the historical landscape is observed from too great a distance. As Giovanni Levi writes, it is a “search for truth related to the conflictual and active way in which people act in the world”, a search that proceeds through knowledge of the individual without renouncing precision or scientific ambition. This way of looking closely, of paying attention to details and situated experiences, resonates strongly with the way we work within least. When we carry out investigations in a territory in order to imagine co-creative artistic projects, we often adopt a similar approach: we focus on the micro scale—practices, narratives, uses—and place great value on lived experience, which complements and sometimes shifts theoretical frameworks.

The evidential paradigm also highlights a broader tension in the history of science. Since the early modern period, many disciplines have sought to ground their legitimacy in the use of quantitative instruments, in the ability to measure, to count and to establish statistical regularities. Yet there are domains of knowledge, such as the human sciences, where understanding cannot dispense with a confrontation with the singular case, with what cannot be reduced to a numerical series. The symptom of a patient, the handwriting of a manuscript, an archival testimony, these are not simply data among others. They are individual signs that demand interpretation, that escape any attempt at measurement and that carry a profound significance.

The evidential paradigm may appear to be a merely refined epistemological problem, but it is in fact a method that highlights the importance of experience and that, quite coherently, has its roots in a practice: hunting—the reading of traces left on the ground, the deduction of an invisible presence from signs scattered across the landscape. Some scholars have indeed suggested that a first form of narrative thinking may have emerged within hunting societies: the cognitive capacity, which we share with other animals, to connect dispersed signs into a coherent sequence of events. Footprints embody the paradox of a presence that is no longer there yet can be reconstructed from the traces it has left behind. Perhaps it is from this experience that a more general capacity arose: the ability to think in symbols and signs. Through many transformations, this capacity leads to art, to speech, to writing and to history itself: this very page where I, who wrote a few days ago, and you, who are reading at this moment, coexist—and from which someone, many years from now, may perhaps infer something about the beginning of the twenty-first century.

As part of Faire commun – a shared ecology project in Parc Rigot – least invites you to reflect on the rhythms that flow through living beings, places and time itself. “Faire commun” also means “making time together”: exploring how our lives align – or fall out of step – with the cycles that surround us. This text invites readers to attune to the world’s many pulses, imagining new forms of sensitive coexistence.

At Parc Rigot, students, researchers and artists came together to resonate with the land – an interdisciplinary and sensory exploration aimed at revealing the unique rhythms of the landscape, its lifeforms and its uses. By observing the park’s centuries-old oaks, its passers-by and its pond, they highlighted how each element vibrates at its own tempo – sometimes steady, sometimes chaotic – composing a shared, living score.

The word “rhythm” comes from the Greek verb rhéô, meaning “to flow”. In Greek philosophy, panta rhei (“everything flows”) captures the thought of Heraclitus of Ephesus, philosopher of perpetual change: all is in constant transformation, like a river whose waters move constantly, so much so that “one can never step into the same water twice” …

Water, indeed, is at the heart of our first experience of rhythm. Even before birth, we perceive sound through amniotic fluid: heartbeats, breath, blood flow. Only low, rhythmic sounds travel through this liquid medium. After birth, part of this water remains in us: the inner ear, still filled with fluid, senses the world’s vibrations. This original water holds a deep memory of rhythm and time within us. Perhaps that is why Rigot’s pond, nestled at the base of the park, acts as a sensory magnet: it draws the eye, attracts wildlife and becomes a focal point where human and non-human rhythms converge across the day.

Humanity has long sought to measure time. One of the earliest known instruments is a water clock (clepsydra) from the 14th century BCE, discovered in the Karnak Temple in Egypt. Two vessels, connected by a small opening, allowed time’s flow to be measured steadily. At Rigot, the oaks planted on the western side play a similar role: silent timekeepers, inscribing memory into their bark year after year.

In soundscapes little touched by human activity, most sounds follow predictable rhythms. Birdsong, the rustle of wind in leaves, the soft lapping of water – these recurring motifs are registered by living beings as familiar and non-threatening. Such regularity soothes and stabilises the soul. In contrast, abrupt noises – construction, crowds, traffic – disrupt sensory balance, triggering alarm. Auditory rhythm is thus a key element of perceptual stability.

Rhythm is essential to how every species hears. Neurons in the ear and brain activate only when sound frequencies align with a reference rhythm. In the 1960s, Hungarian researcher Péter Szőke slowed down birdsong to reveal its hidden complexity, unheard by the human ear. This attention to the invisible and the subtle informs the sensory work carried out in Parc Rigot: to listen, to slow down, to observe what often slips beneath the surface of perception.

Drawing: ©Anaëlle Clot.

For living beings, time unfolds on three levels: internal rhythm, synchronisation with environmental cycles and coordination with others. Internal rhythm is fine-tuned by external signals – zeitgebers (“time-givers”) – such as light, temperature and seasons. For migratory birds, the memory of thawing snow, the length of day and the behaviour of other species help determine when to depart for breeding grounds.

Time, then, is not solely personal, it is also social. In a beehive, nurse bees maintain a constant internal rhythm, while foragers adjust to the timing of flower openings. The coordination of these internal clocks generates a shared rhythm, or a collective time.

Human societies, too, maintain diverse and complex relationships with time. In many Indigenous cultures, time is tied to local rhythms of land, animals and landscapes. Among Sámi reindeer herders, for instance, the concept of jahkodat holds that each year is unique: migration depends on the snow thawing, pasture health and other shifting factors. “One year is not the sister of the next”, a Sámi proverb says: each cycle demands careful attention and constant adaptation.

Today, globalisation has dulled this seasonal sensitivity. Yet seasonality is not universal. Some regions know four seasons; others alternate between wet and dry. In Nagori, Ryoko Sekiguchi notes that Japan traditionally divides the year into 24 seasons, or even 72 micro-seasons. This refined sense of time shapes language itself, with words and haikus linked to precise moments, weaving culture, climate and expression together.

But so-called “objective” time is also a human invention. In Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald reminds us that while time is tied to the stars, it ultimately rests on convention. Even the solar day varies; to stabilise our clocks, we invented a “mean sun” – a fictional body whose steady motion serves as a reference.

The standardisation of time intensified in the 19th century with the advent of railways. To coordinate schedules, time zones were imposed, overriding the diversity of local times. The world entered an era of strict synchronisation, a standardisation that now coexists with the ecological and temporal dissonance we face.

For non-humans, life depends on a fine attunement between living rhythms and Earth’s cycles. Climate change is unsettling these balances. At Rigot, as elsewhere, seasons shift, temperatures rise, blooms and migrations fall out of sync, disrupting biological clocks. This breakdown threatens the reproduction, food sources and survival of many species. When life’s rhythms fall out of step with Earth’s cycles, the very balance of life begins to waver.

In the face of growing dissonance between human time and living time, Faire commun calls for a sensitive reorientation: to slow down, to listen, to live together. Parc Rigot becomes a shared learning ground, where we can explore new ways of inhabiting time, neither linear or productivist, but rather cyclical, porous, attuned to what grows, changes or disappears. By reconciling Earth’s many temporalities, this project sketches the outline of an inhabitable future.

Antonella Vitale is an architect who has spent part of her career designing refugee camps. Today, talking about displaced people and temporary spaces is not only a way of addressing humanitarian crises, it also implies a broader reflection about what it means to live and cohabit in a world marked by instability and climate change. The experience gained in these contexts shows that it is possible to meet basic housing needs even with limited resources, by directly involving communities and experimenting with more flexible and appropriate solutions. In refugee camps, co-creation and adaptation strategies emerge that can inspire a more general approach to architectural design. At a time of ecological emergency and forced migration, understanding how to ensure dignified living conditions in precarious situations means questioning the vulnerabilities of our own cities and rethinking the ways in which communities can be involved in the construction of living spaces.

What is the link between ecological emergency and migration?
Environmental problems, such as the scarcity of natural resources, desertification, and ecological disasters, are often closely linked to conflict and migration. The construction of refugee camps also brings its own challenges. For example, a side effect of their presence is deforestation, as displaced people need wood for cooking and, in some cases, their settlements expand. It’s important to remember that these people often live in tents for years and build temporary structures of their own accord.

How long are we talking about?
The average time spent in a camp is 17 years. That’s why humanitarian culture has evolved over time: in the past, we simply provided food, water, and temporary accommodation. Today, the aim is to offer as normal a life as possible. Rather than providing temporary accommodation, the idea is to house displaced people with local residents or in reallocated structures, if the local authorities allow it. Refugee camps do not facilitate integration because they create ghettos; they are now seen as a last resort.

What type of facilities are generally available to these populations?
Tents and containers are among the most expensive options in non-European contexts, if only for transport. Tents, in particular, are very precarious and uncomfortable, and depending on the climate, might only last six months. In addition, camps are often set up on land that hasn’t been built on, and there’s usually a good reason why: it could be prone to flooding, too hot, or impossible to cultivate. In general, it remains crucial to move as quickly as possible from the emergency response phase to a transitional phase, and then on to greater stability.

Have you had any experiences of this kind in your work?
During my assignment in Mozambique, I was involved in extending a refugee camp to accommodate an additional 5,000 people. I took over the project after the departure of my predecessor, who had encountered a number of management difficulties. One of the main problems was the fires lit by the camp residents in protest. When I arrived, the situation was complex, and the safety rules were very strict: I had to respect a time limit in the camp and return to my base before sunset. It was one of my first experiences, and I found myself faced with a major challenge, with no clear guidelines on how to proceed, and few resources.

What approach did you take?
I chose to maximise my time in the camp by starting to interact with the different communities. The camp was home to groups from the Great Lakes region of Africa, people marked by deep-rooted tribal conflict. I tried to understand their situation and involve them in the decision-making process, giving them the task of pointing out problems and essential needs. If I hadn’t done this, there would probably have been opposition, because unwittingly, for example, we would have exacerbated enmities between clans by intervening in stories we couldn’t understand, and fuelling tensions.

What strategies did you use to involve the camp residents?
The key moment was the launch of the design and planning phase. I let the residents tell me their needs, aspirations, and preferences for the layout of the homes. For me, the most important thing was to respect the number of people to be housed, while the distribution of the spaces was up to them. This approach had a very positive impact on the feasibility of the project. My constant presence in the camp also helped to deconstruct the prejudice that international aid workers are distant, locked away in their air-conditioned offices or jeeps. By showing that I was willing to listen, I fostered a climate of trust.

How did you overcome the language barrier?
To facilitate communication and mutual understanding, I chose to display the project drawings in visible places in the camp. This aroused the curiosity of the residents, who approached me for information in order to take an active part in meetings. Thanks to this method, we were able to better define the distribution of living spaces according to the real needs of the community. In the end, the key element of this experience was not the technical aspect, but the ability to listen and respond to people’s needs, initiating a process of co-creation that made the project more effective.

Drawing: © Anaëlle Clot.

How did you intervene in public spaces?
The camp included empty areas that served as natural gathering points, such as those around the water pumps, often located under large trees. One of these points was close to the therapeutic feeding centre for children under five and not far from the school. I analysed these existing synergies and integrated them into the creation of a sports field, strategically positioned to encourage physical activity and movement.
In addition, in this area I introduced a more structured communication system, using a tree as a display point for comments, suggestions, and complaints from the community. Although there was more criticism than praise, this system established a clear and direct channel of communication. My aim was to facilitate discussions between the operators and the community, gathering useful feedback to improve the management of the camp. When there’s participation, co-creation or at least an exchange of ideas, people are willing to get involved, especially if it has to do with buildings or the use of space.

How much freedom was there for self-designing buildings?
In Mozambique, we involved people in the construction of houses using local materials: reeds, earth, and straw. Each family was provided with the same quantity of materials, and they could then decide how to use them by appropriating the project. The idea was to move on from tents to very simple but permanent houses, in line with Mozambican standards. It’s also important to bear this in mind: when offering an emergency solution to a population from outside the country, you mustn’t go beyond what the most disadvantaged members of local society have, so as not to fuel tensions.

Are there other levels of co-creation that are desirable in such a context?
Before leaving their country of origin, displaced people had a trade, occupations, and passions. Mapping these skills is an asset that can be exploited to the full, firstly to integrate these people into the world of work and make them self-sufficient, and secondly to contribute to aid programmes for displaced people. Since resources are limited, taking advantage of local skills is a great opportunity. It’s not always easy, it takes time, and you have to meet people, but it’s of enormous benefit to the community, which feels respected rather than marginalised.

Are there any spontaneous practices in the public space that help to foster cohesion?
Food is an important tool of cultural identity, especially in contexts of great disorientation. The opportunity to grow traditional foods not only provides a means of subsistence but also enables people to maintain a link with their culture of origin and share it with the local population. This practice creates opportunities for cultural exchange, for example through small food outlets where camp residents can share their cuisine. It can also facilitate the exchange of agricultural or culinary techniques useful to both the refugee and host communities.

What is the relationship between emergency and planning?
Emergency and planning are almost antagonistic, because in an emergency situation, by definition, there is no time or opportunity to plan. However, we mustn’t fall into the trap of continuous emergency either, as that would be naïve, costly, and politically dangerous. In an emergency, many rules have to be waived. Legislation requires time, strict processes, and co-creation, but it is also the only way forward.

What can we learn from housing in emergency contexts?
In emergency contexts, we learn that delaying action progressively reduces the options available, until none are left. Today’s multiple crises, including climate change, teach us that it is essential to act in time, even in Europe, where, despite resources, cities are not ready to face current and future environmental challenges.
In some parts of the world, climate crisis is gradually rendering entire regions uninhabitable. The problem is not just rising temperatures, but the disappearance of vital resources, forcing people to migrate. However, global attention is more often focused on protecting against migratory flows than on long-term interventions to prevent crises.

Although we walk on it every day and it is essential to our food security, we rarely consider the importance of soil in our lives. What crucial roles does soil play in maintaining the balance of ecosystems? How can we protect it? And how can artistic practices help?
Below is an interview with Karine Gondret, a trained soil scientist and geomatician, HES-SO research associate and lecturer at the Geneva School of Landscape, Engineering and Architecture (HEPIA). Her research focuses on soil quality assessment and mapping.

What is pedology?
A branch of soil science, pedology focuses on the study of soils, i.e. the interactions between living organisms, minerals, water, and air that take place beneath our feet. In pedology, we examine everything that lies between the surface and the first, purely mineral layer, i.e. around 1.50 m deep in our latitudes. Beyond that, when only minerals remain, we enter the field of geology. The role of the pedologist is also to map the soil.

What is meant by good quality soil?
Broadly speaking, good quality soil is soil that is capable of performing the functions necessary for the survival of all living organisms and their environment. Several functions are very important, beyond the most obvious, that of food or biomass production. Soil infiltrates, purifies, and stores water, and recycles nutrients and organic matter. There is also the genetic reserve function, which is still seldom studied. Penicillin, for example, was discovered in the soil. So it’s crucial to protect our soils.

What parameters need to be taken into account to assess the quality of a soil according to its functions?
In general, the higher the organic content of soil, the better it is able to perform its functions. By organic, we mean all living things (earthworms, micro-organisms, bacteria, etc.) and all carbon-rich compounds derived from living things (corpses, excrement, roots, dead leaves, compost, root and bacterial exudates, etc.). Functioning soil is living soil, and much more!
There are several other essential parameters, such as soil depth, pH, texture, porosity, etc. Depending on the function, certain parameters will be more or less important. For example, the function of supporting human infrastructure (roads, buildings, etc.) will inevitably be detrimental to the biomass production function. That’s why politicians have to make choices about the functions they want to protect.

Why is the presence of organic matter in soils important?
Organic matter is the basic food source for the soil’s fauna and micro-organisms. It is continually broken down by soil life into nutrients that are accessible to plants via soil water. Organic matter also improves soil porosity. Porosity is essential for the proper development of life, as it allows nutrient-rich water, air, and roots to circulate. Without this porosity, exchanges are much less effective, and as a result, its functions are much less effective.
In addition, organic matter is capable of increasing the soil’s capacity to store water and of mitigating flooding in towns downstream. It can also retain nutrients and pollutants through its electrical properties. Finally, organic matter that is stabilised in the soil contains around 60% of carbon, and the more it increases in the soil, the more we limit global warming, because all the carbon that is not stored in the soil goes into the atmosphere in the form of CO2.

We’ve talked about what good soil is for humans, but what about the “more than human” world?
As defined by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), soil performs functions that are essential to humankind. In truth, these functions are essential to the proper functioning of ecosystems, and humans simply benefit from them. For example, many pollinators spend part of their life cycle in the soil. These pollinators make it possible to obtain fruit and feed wildlife, which is beneficial for natural environments. But this fruit also benefits humans within agricultural and economic infrastructures, when it is sold. Humans and the environment are deeply interconnected, although we tend to forget this. Finally, compared to about fifty years ago, the organic matter content in most agricultural soils has halved. This means that these soils are becoming increasingly less effective at performing the functions they provide for us.

Images: Thierry Boutonnier, Comm’un sol, 2024. Photo: ©Eva Habasque.

As part of the Faire Commun research project, artist Thierry Boutonnier devised a method for sensitively assessing the quality of the soil in Parc Rigot. He organised a picnic on a long organic cotton tablecloth, which was then cut into pieces and buried in different areas of the park. After a few months, the tablecloth was dug up, and the amount of fabric consumed thanks to the soil’s bioactivity provided concrete information about its characteristics. What did you observe?
We haven’t yet finished carrying out the analyses in Parc Rigot, but we’ve observed the soil’s capacity to degrade organic matter through this experiment. In the soil, micro-organisms release enzymes that degrade organic matter (here the cotton tablecloth). We also observed that these micro-organisms were not all equally active: in some areas of the park, the organic matter was broken down very efficiently, while in other areas, the process was much slower. This means that in these areas, there are fewer nutrients available for the plants that grow.
People often don’t realise that there is diversity of soils, even in small areas. In the city, as in Parc Rigot, this diversity is even more marked because humans have had such a strong impact on the soil. There have been many interventions – areas have been completely renatured, others stripped, or artificially added – and this has led to a juxtaposition of very different soils. The challenge is to identify the areas that really work, and protect them.

Is it possible to improve soil quality?
When soil doesn’t have the necessary quality for a given function, we can intervene to improve it, for example by adding organic matter or by decompacting it (in compliance with the OSol ordinance in Switzerland). Nevertheless, soil quality only improves very slowly; sometimes it takes several human generations, sometimes improvement is impossible. Soil is a non-renewable resource, as it takes a very long time to create: it is said to increase by an average of 0.05 millimetres per year. In very steep areas, it even becomes thinner and thinner.
It can also deteriorate rapidly. It looks solid and is thought to be immutable, but nothing could be further from the truth. Even when we’re trying to improve its quality, we have to be very careful, because every intervention on the soil leads to its deterioration. It’s a delicate process that doesn’t always work – we’re still experimenting.
Soil is at the intersection of physics, biology, and chemistry. It’s a complex world, and by no means do we know everything about it. So it’s all the more important to protect it, because it’s where all plant nutrients are found, and as they develop, they form the basis of the diet of all mammals. The soil is truly the place where life is created.

“We pray your grace that no lord of no manor shall common upon the common.

We pray that all freeholders and copyholders may take the profits of all commons, and there to common, and the lords not to common nor take profits of the same.

We pray that Rivers may be free and common to all men for fishing and passage.

We pray that it be not lawful to the lords of any manor to purchase lands freely, (i.e. that are freehold), and to let them out again by copy or court roll to their great advancement, and to the undoing of your poor subjects.”

The date is 6 July 1549. The peasants of Wymondham, a small town in Norfolk, England, have risen in rebellion. They are marching across the fields to cut down the hedges and fences of private farms and pastures, including the estate of Robert Kett, who surprisingly joins the protests, giving his name to the rebellion. As they march, they are joined by farm workers and craftspeople from many other towns and villages. On 12 July, 16,000 insurgents camp at Mousehold Heath, near Norwich, and draw up a list of demands addressed to the King, including those mentioned above. They will hold out until the end of August, when more than 3,500 insurgents will be massacred and their leaders tortured and beheaded. But what provoked this insurrection? And why was the repression so bloody?

Kett’s Rebellion was a reaction to the hardships inflicted by the extensive enclosures of common lands. These lands, which were of great economic and social importance, were managed according to rules and boundaries established by the communities themselves, guaranteeing a balance between their members. The plots were used for grazing, gathering wood and wild plants, haymaking, fishing, or simple passage, and even included shared farmland, where peasants each cultivated small portions of the collective land. The common land system thus contributed to the subsistence of the communities and, in particular, the most disadvantaged.

With enclosures, common land was reorganised to create large, unified fields, demarcated by hedges, walls, or enclosures, and reserved for the exclusive use of large landowners or their tenants. This gradual process of land appropriation was not exclusive to England but was a large-scale phenomenon that spread in various forms throughout Europe (and even more violently in its colonies) from the 15th century onwards. This is the phenomenon that Karl Marx describes in Das Capital as “primitive accumulation”: agricultural workers, deprived of their means of production (land), are forced to work for wages, possessing nothing other than their labour power. This was one of the factors that led to the emergence of capitalism, a process involving violence, expropriation, and the breaking of traditional social ties.

Drawing: ©Anaëlle Clot.

Another significant aspect of enclosures is their impact on the role of women. Until the Middle Ages, a subsistence economy prevailed in Europe, in which productive work (such as tilling the fields) and reproductive work (such as caring for the family) had equal value. With the transition to a market economy, only work that produced goods was considered worthy of remuneration, while the reproduction of labour power was deemed to have no economic value. What’s more, as we have shown, the loss of use rights over common land particularly affected already-discriminated groups such as women, who found in this land not only a means of subsistence, but also a space for relationships, knowledge sharing, and collective practices.

Feminist researcher Silvia Federici, in her celebrated book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, reflects on the link between the privatisation of land and the worsening of women’s condition: “For in pre-capitalist Europe, women’s subordination to men had been tempered by the fact that they had access to the commons and other communal assets (…). But in the new organisation of work every woman (…) became a communal good, for once women’s activities were defined as non-work, women’s labour began to appear as a natural resource, available to all, no less than the air we breathe or the water we drink (…). According to this new social-sexual contract, proletarian women became for male workers the substitute for the land lost to the enclosures, their most basic means of reproduction, and a communal good anyone could appropriate and use at will.”

The consequences of this exacerbation of power relations between the sexes were manifold: women found themselves increasingly confined to the domestic sphere, economically and socially dependent on male authority, and controlled in the management of their bodies by demographic policies that were essential to a society dependent on the flow of labour power. Control of the female body, through the condemnation of contraception and the traditional knowledge associated with care, became central to the emerging capitalist society. The witch-hunts that struck down thousands of women in Europe and America were part of this repression and control.
In the European colonies, similar processes of expropriation and violence were justified by the rhetoric of domination over “savages”. This pattern, based on the extraction of resources and cheap labour, continues to this day: think of the appropriation of indigenous lands in the global South for the exploitation of natural resources. Capitalism and oppression are two sides of the same coin.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality, wrote: “The first person who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, ‘Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.’”

Rousseau’s thinking in this book is not without its problems, and, among other things, fuelled the dangerous myth of the “good savage”, which would in part justify colonialism. Yet these words represent a warning and a hope, inviting us to question the very foundations of society: structures, institutions, and economic systems are not immutable. Change is always possible, provided we have the courage to imagine it.

The gardener, hands immersed in the soil and in constant contact with plants, might seem to have an idyllic job in the face of urban hassles. But, according to Karel Čapek, nothing could be further from the truth. In his book The Gardener’s Year (1929), Čapek describes the gardener’s problems and tribulations in the face of frost, drought, and the overweening ambitions of small urban gardens. His wonderfully written tale, imbued with irony, offers a reflection on the complexity of human nature, not without a touch of humour and levity. Below is a short extract from the book.

We say that spring is the time for germination; really the time for germination is autumn. While we only look at nature it is fairly true to say that autumn is the end of the year; but still more true it is that autumn is the beginning of the year. It is a popular opinion that in autumn leaves fall off, and I really cannot deny it; I assert only that in a certain deeper sense autumn is the time when in fact the leaves bud. Leaves wither because winter begins; but they also wither because spring is already beginning, because new buds are being made, as tiny as percussion caps out of which the spring will crack. It is an optical illusion that trees and bushes are naked in autumn; they are, in fact, sprinkled over with everything that will unpack and unroll in spring. It is only an optical illusion that my flowers die in autumn-; for in reality they are born. We say that nature rests, yet she is working like mad. She has only shut up shop and pulled the shutters down; but behind them she is unpacking new goods, and the shelves are becoming so full that they bend under the load. This is the real spring; what is not done now will not be done in April. The future is not in front of us, for it is here already in the shape of a germ; already it is with us; and what is not with us will not be even in the future. We don’t see germs because they are under the earth; we don’t know the future because it is within us. Sometimes we seem to smell of decay, encumbered by the faded remains of the past; but if only we could see how many fat and white shoots are pushing forward in the old tilled soil, which is called the present day; how many seeds germinate in secret; how many old plants draw themselves together and concentrate into a living bud, which one day will burst into flowering life—if we could only see that secret swarming of the future within us, we should say that our melancholy and distrust is silly and absurd, and that the best thing of all is to be a living man—that is, a man who grows.

Image: Natália Trejbalová, Few Thoughts on Floating Spores (detail), 2023.
Courtesy of the artist and Šopa Gallery, Košice. Photo: Tibor Czitó.

In everyday language, the term “landscape” encompasses a variety of notions: it can refer to an ecosystem, a beautiful view, or even an economic resource. However, the complexity of the term can be better understood and approached through the concept of “experience”.

Experience is something that brings us into contact with the outside, with otherness: in this context, the landscape is no longer seen as an object, but rather as a relationship between human society and the environment. An experience is also something that touches us emotionally, that moves and transforms us. Viewing a “landscape” as such helps us realise how much it gives meaning to our individual and collective lives, to the extent that its transformation or disappearance leads to the destruction of sensitive markers of existence in the lives of its inhabitants. Experience can also be seen as a form of practical knowledge or wisdom. It is the kind of knowledge that is acquired by living in a place, which makes the people who inhabit a landscape its experts. Finally, experience is also a form of experimentation: this is the active aspect of our relationship with the world, enabling us to discover and create new knowledge and to bring to life what is yet only potential.

We might take these reflections a step further and argue that human beings live off the landscape—a statement that may seem hyperbolic, but that makes sense if we pay close attention. Indeed, the landscape is the source of our food: we live in the landscape and the latter activates representations and emotions within us. Our relationship with the landscape is dynamic: by changing it, we also change ourselves. It is therefore impossible to avoid entering into a relationship with the landscape. The very choice of ignoring and not ‘experiencing’ a landscape can have practical and symbolic consequences.

It is on the basis of these observations that Jean-Marc Besse wrote La Nécessité du Paysage (the Necessity of the Landscape): an essay on ecology, architecture, and anthropology, as well as an invitation to question our modes of action. In it, the French philosopher warns us against any action on the landscape: an attitude that places us ‘outside’ the said landscape, which, as mentioned above, is simply not plausible. Acting on a landscape means fabricating it, in other words starting from a preconceived idea that ignores the fact that the landscape is a living system and not an inert object. “Acting on therefore involves a twofold dualism, separating subject and object on the one hand, and form and matter on the other.”

So how might we escape this productive yet falsifying paradigm? Besse suggests a change of perspective: moving from acting on to acting with, recognising “that matter is animated to a certain extent” and envisaging it “as a space of potential propositions and possible trajectories”. The aim, in this case, is to interact “adaptively and dynamically”, to practise transformation rather than production. Acting with means engaging in ongoing negotiation, remaining open to the indeterminacy of the process, and being in dialogue with the landscape: in a word, collaborating with it.

Georg Wilson, All Night Awake, 2023

Acting with the soil
The “abiotic” dimension of soil is addressed, among other disciplines, by topography, paedology, geology, and hydrography. However, from a philosophical point of view, soil is simply the material support on which we live. This is where we construct the buildings we live in and the roads we travel on, and it is the soil that makes agriculture possible, one of the oldest and most complex fundamental manifestations of human activity. This “banal” soil is therefore in reality the focus of a whole series of essential political, social, and economic issues, and as such it raises fundamental questions. What kind of soil, water, or air do we want? The environmental disasters linked to the climate crisis and soil erosion or the consequences of the loss of fertility of agricultural and forest land call for collective responses that draw on both scientific knowledge and technical skills, as well as many political and ethical aspects.

Acting with the living
The landscapes we inhabit, travel through, and transform (including the soil and subsoil) are in turn inhabited, travelled through, and transformed by other living beings, animals and plants. In his essay Sur la Piste Animale (On the Animal Trail), philosopher Baptiste Morizot invites us to live together “in the great ‘shared geopolitics’ of the landscape”, by trying to take the point of view of “wild animals, trees that communicate, living soil that works, plants that are allies in the permacultural kitchen garden, to see through our eyes and become sensitive to their habits and customs, to their immutable perspectives on the cosmos, to invent thousands of relationships with them”. To interpret a landscape correctly, it is necessary to take into account the “active power of living beings” with their spatiality and temporality, and to integrate our relationship with them.

Acting with other human beings
A landscape is a “collective situation” that also concerns inter-human relations in their various forms. A landscape is linked to desires, representations, norms, practices, stories, and expectations, and it draws on emotions and positions as diverse as people’s desires, experiences, and interests. Acting with other human beings means acting with a complex whole that includes individuals, communities, and institutions, and drawing on the practical and symbolic—in a continuous process of negotiation and mediation.

Acting with space
Considered through the tools of geometry, space is an objective entity: its dimensions, proportions, and boundaries can be satisfactorily described. However, the space of the landscape cannot be reduced to measurable criteria. In reality, it is an intrinsically heterogeneous space: “locations, directions, distances, morphologies, ways of practising them and of investing in them economically and emotionally are not equivalent either spatially or qualitatively”. Interpreting the space of the landscape correctly therefore means remembering that “numerical” and “geometric” measurements are necessarily false, and that the set of geographies (economic, social, cultural, or personal) that make it up are neither neutral, nor uniform, nor fixed in time.

Acting with time
When we think of the relationship between landscape and time, the first image that springs to mind is that of the earth’s crust and the geological layers that make it up, or that of archaeological ruins buried beneath the surface. In short, we imagine a sort of tidy “palimpsest” of a past time, with which all relations are closed. The time of the landscape, however, should be interpreted according to more complex logics: we need only think of the persistence of practices and experiences in its context, and the fact that landscape destruction is never total: rather, it is transformation. What’s more, the time of the landscape also includes non-human time scales, such as geology, climatology, and vegetation. They are temporalities to which we are nonetheless closely linked. Thus, in reality, the landscape remains in constant tension between past and present.

“Our era,” Jean-Marc Besse concludes, “is one of a crisis of attention. […] Landscape seems to be one of the ‘places’ where the prospect of a ‘correspondence’ with the world can be rediscovered […]. In other words, the landscape […] can be seen as a device for paying attention to reality, and thus as a fundamental condition for activating or reactivating a sensitive and meaningful relationship with the surrounding world”, in other words, the necessity of the landscape.