Let's begin with a detour to a previous exhibition held at arc en rêve between November 2024 and May 2025, entitled Forest Parts. By blending a playful landscape-workshop, a magic lantern, and historical references, it offered visitors the multiple narratives that shape the Landes de Gascogne forest. The curators from Neringa Forest Architecture (Jurga Daubaraitė, Egija Inzule, and Jonas Žukauskas) invited us to collectively consider this diverse and interdependent space as a landscape defined by the economic imperatives and market logic of maritime pine monocultures, but also as a complex environment where an awareness of biodiversity emerges and manifests itself.

For several months, children and adults alike were captivated by the activity, manipulating tools and tactile games made from wood samples sourced from private and public pine monocultures, as well as from forests with greater biodiversity. These elements were combined with industrially processed wooden objects, allowing everyone to immerse themselves in the specific characteristics of the forest and understand the close interplay between nature and forestry. Exhibited in spring 2025 as part of the Nouvelles saisons exhibition, the artist Christophe Doucet¹ – based in the Landes region – shares this multifaceted vision: “The landscape of the ‘Landes triangle’ is a mental construct. It’s an elevation of the cadastral map, like a carpenter assembling their work based on the blueprint they’ve previously drawn on the ground.” Made by foresters to delineate the different plots, the tree markings are purely functional signs, devoid of any artistic intent. Through photography, Christophe Doucet transforms traces of paint and plastic strips into signs evocative of both sacredness and violence. In this practice of organizing forest space, he identifies a new paradox: although simple and crude, these marks are the result of extremely precise calculations.

The forest landscape can then be interpreted as a productive infrastructure inherent to the territory. Christophe Doucet explains: “The rectangular shape of the forest is not accidental; it scrupulously follows the geometric cadastral layout. Each corner of the plot is marked by a boundary stone, a real and material manifestation of the land registry, which I associate with a foundational form of writing. These boundary stones materialize the property line and, by analogy, the boundary of a territory that one might mark with various gestures: setting up a stone, breaking a branch, scratching the earth, stripping the bark from a tree. The surveyor standardized this practice, which I associate with a primitive form of writing. Thus, in Exodus, before the revelation of the Ten Commandments, Moses is asked to delimit the mountain. One might wonder what gestures the prophet used to delimit the sacred mountain and whether they were not the same as those used by foresters.” These are the same elements – markers, signs, and signs – that the children who participated in the “ateliers de la forêt²" discovered, among those that mark the development of the Landes de Gascogne forest. After a visit to the exhibition-workshop Forest Parts, they visited a natural site and an industrial wood processing site, chosen according to the geographical location of their school. Each class was then invited to create, using samples taken on site, its miniature representation of the Landes forest of the future, exhibited in Nouvelles saisons in the fall of 2025.

Commenting on this outdoor educational project, Sara Meunier and Flora Stich explained that the children imagined the forest of tomorrow, incorporating the underground ecosystem they discovered during their visits, represented by numerous root systems. From their collected specimens, the children cataloged what would constitute their ideal forest: diverse species, animals, and fungi, highlighting the importance of water and its interaction with the atmosphere. This ecosystem, which they envision as diverse as possible, incorporates the concept of risk and develops in their imagination as a place where every species has its place and respects those with which it coexists. This led to their suggestion: "Humans will travel through the air so as not to disturb the animals. They will travel using flying cars and zip lines."

In the interview dedicated to the importance of climate in defining the Gironde region, particularly its landscape and environmental aspects, agronomist Yves Brunet (autumn 2025) emphasized the close links between micrometeorology and forests. He explained the relationship between soils and the atmosphere, the impact of trees on the climate, and the vulnerability of an ecosystem increasingly weakened by storms and fires. These latter themes underpin the work of Rachel Rouzaud, who participated twice in the exhibition. Through the creation of rugs, the architect and artist offers collective cartographic interpretations of the same territory.

The first rug (spring 2025), preceding Nouvelles saisons, presented the chronology of the 2022 forest fires in the Gironde region: “Its composition begins with tight, monochrome green rows illustrating a monoculture pine forest. A thin red border marks the fire episode, triggering a change in pattern. Touches of brown and white represent the bare earth gradually recovering. Then, a transition occurs through rows of tight dots, slightly different from the first, which evoke the possibility of a new reconstruction of the Landes de Gascogne forest. This latter anticipates the known risk of climate change with the acceleration of disasters such as forest fires and would allow for better firefighting management, with wider forest roads, introducing a new hierarchy of tree components and new species represented by more varied colors suggesting the alternation of species”, explains Rachel Rouzaud.

Her second contribution (winter 2025-2026) takes the form of an assemblage of wooden frames on which six independent rugs are arranged. These rugs were created during participatory workshops co-constructed with around forty students from the Hostens primary school, as well as members of the public from the arc en reve, who were invited to participate in an open workshop Tisser le territoire in the maingallery. "While the first rug is an optimistic projection of the disaster and its reconstruction, the second collectively addresses different memories of a tragic event to create a shared tapestry of individual recollections. The students share their memories of the fire, putting into words their perceptions, worries, and anxieties during this episode, which necessitated urgent evacuations." These shared memories were drawn on tracing paper before being transcribed into textiles using pieces of felt. Their final representation was the subject of negotiations: "points of negotiation were established based on the dexterity in using the scissors, the help I could provide on a difficult task, or the sharing or transfer of this difficult creation to a classmate designated beforehand as a specialist in the subject. It is during this moment of translation that I must keep the illustrated memory in mind so that, once the rug is finished, I can put them in order and act as a reporter of the transcriptions left on the rug," tells Rachel Rouzaud.

The representations of memories are then sewn onto a single backing before tufting³, which links the disparate figures to create a unified and coherent whole. Wool fills the gaps between each representation. "The roads that appear create a link between the children's memories, which flow together, and add depth to the narrative through an imagined landscape. The work stops once the defined format is reached and the canvas, filled and saturated, has become a whole: a rug."

For Rachel Rouzaud, the work of memory deposited in the rugs contributes to the transmission and maintenance of the collective consciousness of forests as common goods. Weaving a rug together means "positioning oneself against the current trend of productivist immediacy that prioritizes 'the fact' at the expense of 'doing' and 'the time to do.” It means adopting an approach that brings together and interconnects everyone's memories and projections, going beyond the patchwork, which would be merely the assemblage of independent visions. The question of transmission and collective awareness also motivates Ivan Mathie and Antoine Mounier (members of the Toutes Directions collective) with À la lisière (On the Edge), exhibited in winter 2025-2026. Considering that the unprecedented fires that ravaged the Gironde forest in the summer of 2022 disrupted its identity and use and renewed the perspective on this forest, subject to intense pressures linked to climate change, they documented the physical and psychological traces left by the fire. Through photography, documentary film, and cartography, they conducted a project investigation and storytelling taking the form of a traveling exploration by bicycle, of which À la lisière retraces a fragment.

“At the edge of risk, the contours of the forest become the observation post for this landscape space that some consider natural, and which for others remains largely artificial. The forest tells its story through those who maintain a daily relationship with it. Where fire has pushed back the pine forest, we continue to observe the line of treetops in the distance, hoping that they will one day draw closer. Our collective relationship to risk transforms as the boundary between urbanization and plantation blurs. When the pines stand at the foot of the bay window, fascination and mistrust coexist without contradicting each other,” explain photographers Antoine Mounier and Ivan Mathie.

This approach allows for the collection of on-site testimonies with the ambition of involving local actors in a cooperative dynamic aimed at initiating an ecological redirection of the affected sites. This is how attention to the landscape, and more particularly to that of the forest, can be seen through these five contributions whose proposals complement each other.

1. Invited to contribute to the exhibition by the Bakery Art Gallery – a contemporary art gallery, bakery, bookstore and publishing house in Bordeaux. ↗
2. Educational action carried out by arc en rêve with 9 classes in the spring of 2025. ↗
3. Use of a specific electrical device for the production of shag rugs. ↗