November 25, 2025
Hi Alexis,
I didn’t dare to send you an email before, to stay fresh in our conversation.
I just wanted to tell you that I am very excited to talk to you after the great time that I spent with Félicien in Annemasse.
I am ready to start the conversation whenever you are.
Cheers,
Eric
December 1, 2025
Hi Eric,
Félicien spoke very highly of your exhibition 4 Rivières at La Villa du Parc in Annemasse. There are so many intersections with our research on the techno-vernacular and the reclaiming of folkloric practices in the digital age. Since we have never met in person, I am really glad that we get the opportunity to have this conversation. Thank you for your invitation!
I am curious to learn more about what you are cooking up for 1646. To kick off our discussion and scatter some seeds, can you describe the current atmosphere in your studio? What is your routine? What are the books that are at the top of your piles these days? Do you have a mood board to help you prepare the exhibition, or any other sources that you use as your starting point?
Warmly,
Alexis
December 2, 2025
Hi Alexis,
It is also a pleasure to start a discussion with you after I had a dialogue with Félicien about my previous exhibition 4 Rivières in Annemasse. I am very excited to talk to you in resonance with the themes that you were just referring to and in your personal curating practice in Montpellier at MO.CO. I think that it is a fantastic fit!
The project began with my research into the Fruit Corso of Tiel. It consists of a yearly festive parade celebrating food abundance by featuring floats built by different clubs around Tiel, covered in fruit and vegetables. Inspired by flower corsos (which are more renowned), the Fruit Corso of Tiel was specifically created by the local fruit producers of the Betuwe region in 1961 to promote their local products. The resonance with my personal interests stroke me: at a junction between agriculture, folklore, and the global economy. Raised in a farming family, with my father still managing the ancestral corn fields in Boudemange (Auvergne), my work frequently returns to questions of land use, vegetal growth, and the body’s relationship to the landscape.
So I started with field work: I met with all the corso clubs, local fruit growers and a few companies that distribute and market the fruits on a world global scale. I shot a poetic film essay in the hangars as the floats were being covered in fruit and I purchased elements from different floats after the parade in late September 2025. At the studio, I began by assembling the elements together, including a new global narrative. A pair of hands offers giant fruits as a gesture of mutual giving, two metallic structures are being transformed into giant mutant scarecrows with hybrid monstrous wax figures…
I am still figuring out what will go where, so maybe it is easier to explain if I show you sketches from all the rooms:
Room 1
> Papier mâché hand with cherry (assemblage from different corso floats)
> 3 aluminium/glass trucks // aluminium, casted glass, blown glass, 80 x 11 x 15 cm each
> 3 wax insect trucks // 80 x 11 x 15 cm each
> Video essay
> Abundance Diary 1 // arrangement of 16 digital and analog Polaroids in wooden frame, 57 x 48 cm each
> The beginning of a wall poster of trucks that continues in Room 2
Room 2
> Wall poster of trucks with fruits, juice splashes and the characters of De avonturen van Flipje [The adventures of Flipje], the raspberry man. The poster starts in Room 1, and goes around Room 2 like a panorama. Flipje, the raspberry man, was invented as a logo from a local jam company from Tiel in the 1930s. On top of being a logo such as Tony the Tiger for Frosties, the jam company published the 50 books of De avonturen van Flipje that made Flipje a popular character aside from its advertisement purpose
> On the poster, 6 pieces from the Nutri-Score series // silkscreen frit print on slumped glass, 100 x 70 x 20 cm each
> Two scarecrows (assemblage of corso floats, textile from truck cover and casted wax heads and fruits) // 350 x 200 x 200 cm each
> Papier mâché hand with apple (assemblage from different corso floats)
> Abundance Diary 2-3 // arrangement of 16 digital and analog Polaroids in wooden frame, 57 x 48 cm each
Room 3
> Mummies // a cornfield labyrinth made of denim
> Stream of Infertility // 30 floating mutant glass spermatozoa (approximately 60 cm long each) will be hanging from the ceiling, navigating the maze walls
> Papier mâché snail with a gnome head (assemblage from different corso floats)
> Abundance Diary 4 // arrangement of 16 digital and analog Polaroids in wooden frame, 57 x 48 cm each
I am inspired by Affluence and Freedom: An Environmental History of Political Ideas by Pierre Charbonnier. In his essay, Charbonnier argues that modern political ideas of freedom have been fundamentally shaped by the promise of unlimited growth and the conquest of nature. He traces the history of political thought from this perspective, showing how concepts like democracy and autonomy have been historically linked to industrial expansion, and the exploitation of earthly resources.
In addition, the exhibition features a few personal tales and intimate stories that intertwine with these global concerns. How do our bodies grow? How do we mutate? What does it mean to have a fertile body?
Are you getting a general idea of what is on the menu?
Cheers,
Eric
December 26, 2025
Cher Eric,
Please accept my apologies for the late reply. December was hectic! I have spent the last two days watching videos and reading up on the Fruit Corso. Thank you for this glimpse into your upcoming exhibition. It is truly fascinating to see that you have been working through an anthropological lens, starting with field work. Immersing myself in your work initially led me down two paths: the role of rituals, and the loss of the sacred within nature.
The Fruit Corso brought to mind a rather different festival that I have taken part in for the two years I have been settled in Occitanie, in the south of France: the Fête du Pois Chiche (Chickpea Festival). Created in 2008 by a group of friends in the village of Montaren-et-Saint-Médiers, it is a pagan celebration conceived in the spirit of a traditional peasant feast. Every May, a papier-mâché totem representing a giant chickpea is brought out and carried by a procession of characters, accompanied by songs written for the occasion – always humorous, often bawdy, and sung in both French and Occitan. The watchword is ‘to create community without falling into communalism’.
Parades are a form of collective ritual. They possess this ability to weave intergenerational bonds and to federate a community. In a capitalist society that seeks to optimise labour time, rituals are relegated to the interstices of free time and leisure, often misperceived as “unproductive”. And yet, it is during these rituals that a society’s most distinctive traits are forged: costumes, songs, dances, culinary recipes, narratives… in short, customs. Capitalist societies have so thoroughly optimised modes of production that they have become uniform. Consequently, we more readily associate such customs with distant lands; but before colonising other countries, it was first within our own Western nations that we lost the sense of ritual. The national narrative has supplanted many of the vernacular specificities of our regions.
Conservative thinkers, and even far-right movements, readily co-opt traditions to conjure narratives that incite nationalism and isolationism. Yet rituals are fascinating, precisely because they adapt to each era and locale; transforming, vanishing, and being born anew. A ritual doesn’t necessarily have to be “traditional” in the strict sense, as there isn’t always a continuity with the past. I find it funny that, in the case of the Fruit Corso of Tiel, it was only after watching a film of a 1950s parade in Florida that Bernard Bruggeman conceived the idea, eventually bringing it to life in 1961. It is clear that the starting point must have been regional pride in agricultural production, coupled with an opportunity for commercial outlets. Collective joy is always conducive to trade, isn’t it?
In the chronological summary on the website of the Fruit Corso, I noticed that the recognition of the event as a Betuwe tradition, and subsequently as UNESCO intangible cultural heritage, occurred in tandem with rising attendance and, presumably, increased agricultural output. From local to global. It is as if recognition must go hand in hand with growth, and ultimately, abundance. Curves, always curves. I find it striking how your poster of trucks, as well as your glass spermatozoa, also form curves, don’t they?
We have the power to create new rituals, and art is a prime example of this. I often perceive local rituals as a counterforce to dominant models, but is that truly the case? How do you view the Fruit Corso within this dynamic? And where does your own corso stand in relation to it?
In your Polaroid series Abundance Diary, you employ medieval iconography, such as the illumination of a mandrake. How did you come across this iconography?
We often link peasant rituals to the medieval period, that pivotal era between feudalism and capitalism. While the Middle Ages were rich in peasant and pagan rituals, monotheistic religions and Church reforms gradually absorbed them. They also drastically altered our perception of our environment. According to these monotheistic faiths, if God created the world for man from inert matter, He remains outside this world, above it. Thus, what God created can be reified and utilised by humans. Lands, rivers, animals, and plants are no longer sacred; they are merely objects to be exploited and optimised for production. This marks the beginning of the disaster.
I doubt that is the case for the Fruit Corso, but could ritualised, nature-oriented festivals – paying homage to plants or fruit – re-infuse the living world with a sense of the sacred? By sacred, I mean that which commands our attention and our respect for the vital force of our surroundings. This begins with a mode of cultivation that respects the land, and is therefore, at times, parsimonious…
I also wanted to discuss the notions of fertility, marketing, and how a perfect fruit is a suspect fruit… but I shall leave that for our next emails, as this one is already too long.
Wishing you a very happy festive season.
Warmly,
Alexis
January 8, 2026
Cher Alexis,
Thank you so much for your email. It is so rich, there are a million things that I want to react to. I had a look at the Chickpea Festival. I want to go now!
Ritual?
Such large scale rituals as the Fruit Corso – especially when they are so public (UNESCO, television broadcast, etc.) – can’t function without the political and economical actors that financially support them. So I guess that they are part of the same power system. They need sponsors from the city and private funds from the local companies that gain publicity through the parade. Nevertheless, it brings communities together. It was beautiful to witness the collective creative intelligence of each village that worked towards an artistic goal to make the most magnificent float. But at the same time it is a competition! Because the parade ends with a ranking sanctioned by an autonomous jury.
This raises the question of what the dominant model actually is, and points out the polarisation of society through it. Is it an ecological voice that is conscious of the finite nature of resources, or an expansionist discourse that praises infinite growth and resources? Could it be both?
Sacred?
It is also interesting to point out that sustainability is a factor in the grading of the Fruit Corso floats. This year, two floats were conceived with fruits and seeds in jars, in order to be theoretically consumed after the parade. I wonder what it means symbolically to waste so much food, not mentioning the tons of metal and polystyrene? Is it not actually totally subversive and pagan, like sacrificing a lamb that wouldn’t be eaten or returned to the ground afterwards? Is the food really wasted if it is part of an art form or a ritual? Does it celebrate the fertility of nature, or Man’s victory over nature by being able to grow and distribute whatever they want in gargantuan quantities?
Personal parade
I believe that my own corso plays with and within these contradictions, trying to create new poetic links between a society that built its concept of liberty with the reach of infinite resources (access to abundance = the opportunity to participate in social life), and a broader cosmology. I explore these connections by bending and subverting a capitalistic iconography (giant ad posters, food logistics…) into intimate tales where my body takes part of these economical and natural cycles – the curves that you mentioned in your message. The questions mentioned in the previous paragraph also had an impact on the way the works were conceived for the exhibition, as most of the new works take part of an upcycling waste process: assemblages of discarded float elements and kilos of repurposed textiles (truck covers and jeans).
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Best,
Eric
P.S.: I am happy to answer your question about mandrakes and fertility!
January 20, 2026
Cher Eric,
Thank you for sharing your insights on the Fruit Corso and your personal corso; it is all such food for thought, and I am truly feasting on it :)
Abundance and (in)fertility
The past few days, the media in France has been discussing the birth rate (the lowest since the end of the Second World War) and, more broadly, the decline in fertility worldwide.
Your exhibition Seeds of Plenty plays with a profusion of fruit, colours, and media, directly evoking fertility. You have even included mutant spermatozoa, though it remains unclear what they are seeking to fertilise exactly.
Commonly, the definition of fertility has two primary meanings. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, fertility refers to: ‘1. (of humans, animals and plants) the quality of being able to produce young or fruit; 2. (of land) the quality of producing a large number of good quality crops.’ As you mentioned, both aspects encourage abundance and often appear to be an expression of capitalism (‘an expansionist discourse that praises infinite growth’).
A third dimension to fertility can be added: ‘3. (of the mind or imagination) the quality of producing a lot of unusual and interesting ideas.’ I link this to what I call “alternative fertilities”: those that do not necessarily involve procreation. I see your exhibition, and art more generally, as a form of alternative fertility.
How did you collect and select the images for your Abundance Diary? Could you tell me about some of these images, including the mandrake?
A perfect fruit is a suspicious fruit
You have used images of the kind of perfect, selected, calibrated, and polished fruits and vegetables, found in advertisements and supermarket packaging. Since moving to Occitanie, I have decided to eat food from cooperatives and farmers’ markets only. I realised that the sheer number of fruits and vegetables sold in supermarkets without any indication of their variety is frightening (‘carrots’, ‘tomatoes’, etc.). One of the standard quality benchmarks is the product’s consistency, but why should living beings be consistent, especially when there are often dozens or even hundreds of varieties within a single species? Isn’t nature precisely fascinating because it is unpredictable? Where is the place for strangeness? In this regard, I believe that, by subverting these standards, you give pride of place to strangeness in your exhibition.
Marketing distorts our perception of products and says nothing about their quality. Ugliness can be delicious, and beauty can be bland… I am amused by food logos like Flipje, the Raspberry Man, which play on childhood nostalgia, featuring out-of-season fruits that have likely been generously doused in pesticides.
While maize surely reminds you of ancestral farming in your family in Auvergne, many people associate it with GMOs (genetically modified organisms), which are often infertile. How did you conceive your Stream of Infertility and the maize labyrinth?
Absorbing the world’s toxicity (that we ourselves produced)
The atoms of fruits and vegetables, much like those of plastics, pesticides, fungicides, and fertilisers, end up within us: they are extracted by our organisms to form our tissues and bones. We eat our environment; it constitutes us. The pollution of soil, waterways, and our food supply thus directly affects our bodies, notably through endocrine disruptors. Scientific studies show that these are among the primary reasons for the global decline in fertility.
It could be tempting to see a kind of loop here: from the hyper-fertilisation of the soil towards human infertility… what are your thoughts on this?
Warmly,
Alexis
January 22, 2026
Cher Alexis,
I love your vision of fertilisation as ways to plant thoughts, beyond procreation.
I don’t really know what the Stream of Infertility fertilises…
First I thought nothing, or something mutant that encourages evolution for better but probably for worse… I love the idea of thoughts!
The inspiration of the series of mutant glass spermatozoa comes from personal stories of having to make semen analysis.
That is where I heard for the first time that sperms could have malformations: two tails, no tail, big head… or not “active” enough.
I started to read about lower fertility rates partly due to pesticides, and I developed the idea of integrating the mutations to a larger tree of life where the foreign chemistry forms part of our fertile – or in this case infertile? – bodies.
Indeed, if you look cautiously, some look more like primitive fish, or cells dividing.
When I had kids, I never felt more like a lichen. A living organism reproducing cells, part of a larger evolution. It came with a feeling that giving life is giving death also (preferably mine first).
I started by being very cautious of food and health, but I have to admit that I feel powerless and frustrated by the lack of choice offered by the food suppliers, especially being isolated in a Dutch village. I think that it is a crucial political matter.
The series of Polaroids is a way to introduce my intimate self within these global issues. They include instant photographs of my family and me in a larger iconography of abundance where moments at home around the table eating supper are put in perspective with hands of politicians offering fruit baskets to each other, floating spermatozoa, book covers from Ursula Le Guin, strange hominids feasting on cassava root, and medieval iconography, amongst others. In a way, it is a family tree which is free from association like a Warburgian image atlas (in all modesty). I integrated the mandrake story because it amused me to play with the infertile/fertile duality, and I wanted to have it as part of my “family”: The medieval myth says that the humanoid mandrake root (Mandragora officinarum) grew from the semen or blood of hanged men, a folk belief linked to its magical properties in potions, love philters, and witchcraft.
The maize labyrinth (titled Mummies) has a similar construction than the reference to the mandrake. I read in an archeology article that no dead soldiers were found under Napoleon’s Battlefield of Waterloo because their bodies were sold in order to be transformed into fertilisers. Apparently mummies too, although this is not proven. The choosing of the denim comes from referencing coal mining and determining the role of fossil fuels to reach abundance. This is just a backstory that initiated a first impulse. I like the bodily effect that the denim gives to the corn, like a contemporary humanoid mandrake, especially if it is fertilised by these hybrid zombie sperms!
I think that you capture perfectly the ironic positioning of the work: that the colourful splashes of juice and fruit of the lands of plenty hide a darker secret.
But is it really a secret?
Looking forward to reading you soon!
Eric
January 25, 2026
Cher Eric,
The way you have woven together history – from those humanoid mandrake roots to the bodies at Waterloo – with your own story and the narrative of Seeds of Plenty is genuinely fascinating.
Reading your last emails, I have realised your exhibition offers such a wonderfully non-hierarchical vision of the relationships between species, going as far as to create chimeras [mix of two species]: humanoid floral scarecrows, snails with gnome heads… you place the uncanny of the living world and human habits centre stage, embracing all the grotesque forms they take. You address, not without humour, the processes of transformation that humans have initiated (extraction of fossil fuels, hybridisation of species, etc.) or that we are subjected to (absorption of toxins by our bodies, random genetic mutations, etc.).
By creating forms and connections between these phenomena, I hope that Seeds of Plenty will offer the possibility of gaining agency. To me, it is a clever, indirect way of raising awareness about 21st century’s crucial issues: how we farm the land, what we eat, and more broadly, the idea of alternative growth and fertility. This ‘joyous macabre parade,’ caught between the sprouting of an idea and sheer toxicity, feels like an open invitation to dance all together among zombie-fruit floats of the Fruit Corso and rows of mutant seeds.
I wish you every success with the exhibition – it promises to be incredibly fecund! Many thanks for bringing these ideas to fruition.
Warmly,
Alexis
January 26, 2026
Cher Alexis,
I was also thrilled by this conversation! It was a great gift. Thank you.
I just started to hang the first pieces today and the words of our conversation still resonate in my mind!
You truly helped me to structure my thoughts and find interesting interpretations and fun relations in my work.
I can’t wait to continue the conversation in different ways, and show you what the exhibition looks like!
Blessed be the fruit,
Eric
