For the last five years, Eric Tabuchi and Nelly Monnier have been travelling the length and breadth of France, documenting the 450 natural regions or ”pays” that make up the country. Taking as their starting point the ancient historical and geographical entities such as Artois, Morvan and Béarn, they have patiently and meticulously set about describing the ways in which we take over the landscape, live in it and shape it.
The exhibition Je cours vers toi pour lacer tes chaussures (I’ll Come Running To Tie Your Shoe), presented at arc en rêve, is devoted to this ambitious photographic adventure. Focusing in particular on the question of construction, the artists, with their characteristic curiosity, question the limits of the architectural discipline through marginal practices: self-construction, personal initiatives, bricklayers’ houses and art brut are just some of the strategies that are shaping, without us even realising it, many of the built objects in our territories.
Although closely linked to architecture, their research goes against the grain of its academic meaning, and draws up an unreasoned repertoire of the often modest forms that arise in rural and peri-urban environments.
Exhibiting their Atlas des Régions Naturelles at arc en rêve, Eric Tabuchi and Nelly Monnier question the boundaries between the architectural and the vernacular. As the title suggests—borrowed from a Brian Eno song—they praise a free and diversified practice of construction in which the bricolé, the improvised replaces the normative temptation of ‘learned’ architecture.
