Story <

The immersion carried out both on the territory and in the body of the clam in the laboratory is a way of listening and impregnation with a radical alterity.
It is the otherwise silent point of view of the river and its companions that is expressed through this work.
For once, the parole is given to other than humans. It expresses itself in a globality that we usually miss, although it encompasses and sustains us. Its voice reveals that we are part of it, and that by destroying it, it is ourselves we are destroying.

Images filmed in the intimacy of the river, on the surface of the water or below the surface, bear witness to its current state of being, its geographical and temporal metamorphoses, to which we are intimately connected by biological rhythms.
The materials it transports, pollution residues expressed by the clam, unfold before our eyes, reveals the invisible and collective thoughts that govern our actions.
The “local” people, met and companions on the journey through the territory, relate another relationship to time, space and life¹.
Elsewhere, the vestiges of ancient times testify to a very different relationship with the river and its places².

River's Memory undertakes real, exhaustive field work over a long period of time. By choosing the side of slowness, contemplation, exchanges without a specific goal, things independent of our own will happen.
It is as much about forming history as it is about being trans-formed and trans-ported by it.
The “global river” appears to us, with which we enter into resonance and reciprocity.

Anteriority, Future
The streaks of the clam's shell reflect its experience.
Biological data on its health status date back to the 1980s, before the appearance of brown ring disease which has decimated livestock farms for several decades.
Inspection of the stones that litter the river bed from its source to estuary reveals its current life. The coring of estuarine sediments takes us back to its past.
People and associations met during the journey bear witness to a previous biological state, to uses of the river now abandoned for the benefit of others. Everywhere the weaving of a story built with the river emerges. Sensitively encrypted, it reflects both the evolution of the human-nature partnership and the wealth of ancient knowledge.

Elsewhere, new practices are collected (in the form of testimonies, images, etc.) during the course. They are resilient, pragmatic and sensitive at the same time³.

 

Means <

On the territory
- Exhaustive tour of the watershed, in the river bed (on foot or by canoe) and on the banks.
- Meetings with residents and officials; particularly elders, memories of the territory.
- Interviews with representatives of environmental associations in the region.
- Outings to the sites to discuss together what is happening there (recordings).
- Interdisciplinarity of exchanges (biologists, naturalists, historian, anthropologist) in order to guide the investigation into the territory, the meetings, the choice of sites, periods, etc.

In the laboratory (LEMAR, European University Institute of the Sea, University of Western Brittany)
- Co-research with LEMAR scientists around the clam
- Co-research with historian(s) and anthropologist(s)...

Ex-situ partnerships
- Co-operative inquiry on Living Waters (Schumacher College, Dartlington, UK)
- ...

 

Production <

- Film on the river, from the river and its banks. Silent, it shows what simply is, giving voice to the river and its life.
- Drawings (6 diptychs staggered along the river): global and contemplative vision, inventory of both the exterior landscape and our interior landscape which led to these transformations.
- Film about the clam and its world between interior and exterior; its organs are directly accessible to us through the senses, encapsulated in a shell that can be opened.
- Creation of materials from invisible residues of pollution in water and clams.
- Broadcast of recordings made in the territory.
- Sculpture allowing you to physically experience a link with the whole, with the organic root of all things.
- Workshops on the human-other than human relationship⁴
- Publishing, between documentary, art and biology/anthropology.

 

Outputs <

Exhibition
At the end of the program, an exhibition will bring together all the achievements.
Events may be scheduled, such as a cycle of interventions and conferences.

Mobile Agora: making community
Broadcast in the towns and communities crossed by the river, for the duration of the journey, on several stations.
- Showing some achievements, depending on the temporality.
- Gathering with people met during the course and project partners. The idea is to allow other visions to percolate thanks to “ambassadors”, network leaders met previously in the tour. Recognized by their community, these people will bring others to these meetings and will relay scientific missions.
It is about provoking the emergence of ideas from the base, from which to co-construct actions tuned with reality.
- Sponsorships between several stations.
- Interventions in schools.
- Walking groups
- Co-operative inquiry workshops⁴.

 

Issues <

Epistemological
River's Memory offers an approach from the sensitive and holistic side, both of the territory of the river and of the animal which concentrates it by filtration. It is based as much on scientific facts and processes as on the experiences and feelings of everyone. It asks the fundamental questions of the creation of knowledge, its sharing and its integration.

Ontological
The crisis of the sensitive (Morizot⁵) is fundamentally a crisis of otherness: distanced from everything that is non-human, we have become collectively incapable of listening to it (Abram⁶). River's Memory, by engaging in a long process, on the concrete ground, takes the challenge of weaving and transmitting an existential relationship to the living and between the living.

Complexity
By choosing to listen to others in the broad sense, the story is not constructed from a mental projection, from a structuring concept. Any projection has its invigorating lightings but also its blind spots and its style, which is, in my opinion, a very subtle form of violence⁷.
Conversely, listening, absorbing oneself, requires a form of self-withdrawal, a dis-identification of one's mental space for the benefit of everything else. This is the path I follow in my work.
Approaching things this way allows you to embrace complexity as a whole.

 

Notes <

1 – The term living has been widely used in recent years to designate all other species. I use it here with a broader meaning which includes stones, rocks, rivers, oceans; anything that is not human or made by humans.
2 – Particularly megalithic sites.
3 – Like for example Samuel Lewis’ micro-farm in Duault.
4 – Many inspirations will nourish these workshops: from my meeting with Mamus Kogis in 2004, to my readings such as H.D. Thoreau, Guattari, Mathews, Abram... through my ongoing participation in Living water, a co-operative inquiry in a panpsychic world at Schumacher College, Dartlington.
5 – Baptiste Morizot, Manières d'être vivant : enquêtes sur la vie à travers nous, Arles, Actes Sud, 2020. With Andrea Olga Mantovani, S’enforester, d’une rive à l’autre, 2022
6 – David Abram, The spell of the sensuous. For an ecology of the senses [1996].
7 – This is about being transformed by a process where experience takes precedence over the concept, matter over reason, nevertheless active in a second phase. A true interaction with all otherness becomes possible.

 

Stages <

Premises from 2022 to 2024: meetings and establishment of partnerships
- Field surveys and program development
- Meeting with CLIMCLAM researchers, learning about current scientific studies about the clam
- Creation of companionship with partners in the territory and beyond...
Research phase from 2024: research and experiments
- Immersion in the watershed territory: shots, sounds, drawings...impromptu meetings...
- Experiments with scientists, documentation of experiments and other projects around Aulne river
- Transversal research
- Experiment then describe, see what appears...
Achievement from 2025-2026: restitution
- Films, installation, happenings
- Laboratory in progress Océanolab
- Mobile Agora
- Publications, conferences...