In your artistic practice, you intertwine disciplines and forms across contemporary art, photography, storytelling, and investigation. How do you choose your fields of exploration?

My work with images takes place in a specific context—that of the great upheavals triggered by environmental, societal, and climate crises. Within this framework, my approach aims to explore the active power of images and narratives that carry the potential to transform how we live with other beings and the Earth's great cycles.

I conduct this research in a site-specific manner, directly in environments that are disturbed, even devastated by human activity, such as a former photographic factory wasteland, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, or the "Land of Fires" in the Campania region.

From and with these environments, I seek to create new alliances through which we can rethink our relationships with the Earth to heal them and thus invent other modes of cohabitation. 

Within the framework of the MIRA program (International Mobility for Artistic Research) by the Institut français, you completed a residency in the "Land of Fires" in the Campania region of Italy. Could you remind us what makes this region unique and explain why you wanted to develop the *Fleurs de feux* project there? 

With Fleurs de feux, I am continuing an experiment I started ten years ago with philosopher Michael Marder, focusing on plants that grow on the margins of our societies, particularly in the extreme soils of the Anthropocene. The weedy plants, companions of this new project, grow on land prone to the fires of Mount Vesuvius, which overlooks the region, and among the ashes of sometimes highly toxic waste, set aflame by the ecomafia. Until around the 1950s, the soil of the "Land of Fires" was one of the richest and most fertile in Italy, even in Europe. Thanks to volcanic ash and the millennia-long decomposition of organic matter, a humus layer over a meter thick had formed in some places. This land thus became Italy’s vegetable garden until Naples began to spew its waste, later turning into the dumping ground for waste originating not only from northern Italy but also from across Europe.

Astronomical quantities of waste were burned along roadsides, in fields, or buried—sometimes entire trucks filled with waste were directly buried. These burials occurred in volcanic stone quarries, on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, or in farmers' fields, either with their complicity or under the threat of regional ecomafia clans.

In this context of soil and body pollution, I encountered nine plant communities that grow spontaneously in these heavy-metal-laden environments and, in their own way, help heal the soils by absorbing pollutants through their root systems and fibers.

According to some botanists, plants overproduce a molecule known as phenol when they grow in heavily polluted soil. Through the photographic process, I collect this excess phenol without extracting the plant from its environment. To do so, I activate the phenol that is particularly present in these plant beings by immersing or enveloping them in a mist of water, vitamin C, and ashes collected from burned soil. This natural mixture energizes the phenol molecules, causing the plant to leave its imprint on photosensitive surfaces, such as paper or textile. These fabrics themselves come from dumps or waste sorting areas.

Then, inspired by the practice of poet and herbalist Emily Dickinson, who would include a composition of dried plants in each of her letters, I send the phytographic prints of the nine plant communities to philosopher Michael Marder in succession. He responds with a letter to each plant. Upon receiving it, I return to the plant to read the philosopher's words to it. During the reading, I create a new phytograph. It is particularly interesting to compare the first phytographic imprint to the one made during the second encounter.

What were the highlights of this residency, shaped as an encounter with nine plant communities growing in the "Land of Fires"? 

This project was driven by powerful encounters with these plant communities. Over time and through repeated gestures, a unique form of connection was woven between these marginalized beings and our human existence. The work of observing became a work of regard, opening the possibility for new relationships in this devastated context.

These encounters were guided by curator and gallery owner Cristina Ferraiuolo from Naples, as well as by researchers and activists who have been fighting this biocide for many years. With great generosity, each of them helped us to delve into the complexity of this territory, offering sometimes highly divergent perspectives, especially concerning the contamination of bodies and lands in the region.

The encounter with the environments where these plants and activist inhabitants live was also deeply moving. I remember a field accessible via a small road cutting through fruit orchards and vegetable greenhouses. This field lies on the property of one of the major families in the Neapolitan organized crime network. A few meters from their villa, currently under sequestration, two trenches had been dug, revealing a geological history of toxic waste burial on this family’s land. Layers of debris—including asbestos, plastic fragments, old batteries, and ruptured cell batteries—were stabilized between mineral strata, revealing soil horizons symptomatic of the Anthropocene.

In addition to surveying these polluted lands, we visited archaeological sites such as Oplontis and Boscoreale. In Pompeii, we were welcomed by archaeobotanist Chiara Comegna, who studies traces of past plant life at the heart of our project. These plants inhabited the region’s soil even before Vesuvius’s eruption in 79 AD, as evidenced by charred fragments of their vegetal bodies, partly extracted by Chiara Comegna. She showed us plant fragments found in the area of an ancient meadow. This meadow, freshly mowed before Vesuvius’s eruption, was carbonized by the volcano’s pyroclastic flows and is rich in precious clues about the types of weedy plants that grew on this land in those times.

The first time we visited her laboratory, Pompeii was almost deserted. In the distance, three weed whackers were humming. The gardeners of Pompeii were cutting the small plants that nestle in the cracks of the ancient stones of Roman villas. These plants are so common in these places that the Latin root of their name refers to *rudus, ruderis*: ruin. Naturalist Carl von Linné coined this name, but he could hardly have imagined that these plants would also evolve in heavy-metal-saturated soils, in other kinds of ruins—those of capitalism.

The residency will lead to various productions. Could you tell us about them? 

A major exhibition is planned in Naples in early 2025 and in Strasbourg as part of the Photography and Science Prize from May to September next year at Stimultania, a center dedicated to photography.

The exhibition will be structured as an interspecies correspondence, reflecting our creative process. From plant leaf to photosensitive leaf to letter paper, visitors will be invited into this network of relationships.

Phytographs on paper and fabric, in almost human-sized formats, as well as the philosopher’s letters, will respond to each other in a spatial arrangement and, in some points, through reflections.

A series of videos will showcase a walk where we gathered researchers and activists, companions of the project, on a lava flow from Vesuvius that overlooks two major dumpsites. This shared journey included an on-site lecture by philosopher Michael Marder, readings to the plants in attendance, and the harmonies of double flutes played by musician Giovanni Saviello, who makes his own instruments from reeds found in the "Land of Fires."

One area will be dedicated to the phytographic process, while a second, more documentary space will use images and texts—possibly written by the activists and researchers we met—to share past and present stories of the "Land of Fires." This section will also feature charcoal prints of plants that lived before the volcano’s eruption, later preserved through the carbonization of their fibers.

Alongside the exhibition, we are continuing several writing protocols as part of a new form of plant-human correspondence. This time, it is an intercultural exchange between primary and middle school students in Strasbourg and in the "Land of Fires," inviting them to new encounters through weedy plants that live on the margins of their daily lives. 

You are participating in the group exhibition Science/Fiction - Une non-histoire des Plantes at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie until January 19. How did this collaboration unfold? 

This exhibition at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie also draws our attention to plants, inviting us to reflect on the uniqueness of plant life and our relationship with it.

Taking inspiration from the works of Octavia E. Butler and J.G. Ballard, the two curators, Clothilde Morette and Victoria Aresheva, encourage us to consider a visual history of the plant world. In this context—our world as it sometimes appears in visionary narratives—I am presenting my photographic research prior to Fleurs de feux: Chernobyl Herbarium.

Through this series, I explore the question of trauma from the perspective of plants growing in the irradiated soils of Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone. Using rayography, I bring irradiated plants into contact with photosensitive surfaces. The radioactivity contained within the plant contributes to exposing the plant’s form on paper, thereby bringing forth an image as a material trace of an invisible disaster. Growing at the pace of one rayograph per year since the explosion of Reactor No. 4, this encounter between plant and photographic process was also developed with philosopher Michael Marder, who himself was affected by the 1986 nuclear disaster.

Twenty-one rayographs from this series are displayed alongside photographic studies where plants become our companions and collaborators, as seen in the work of Almudena Romero and Alice Pallot. 

Do you already have new expedition ideas for the coming months? Does your approach need to be adjusted in response to the current state of natural environments, particularly with climate change? 

For several years, I have sought to embody these alternative modes of relation to the living world in both philosophical and practical terms through the processes I develop. This has led me to question, like a large community of contemporary artists, the extractive heritage of our mediums—especially since the photography industry has historically consumed a lot of metals, such as silver for film photography and, nowadays, rare metals. At Paris Photo, I will exhibit The Testimony of Soils, large prints created using photosensitized paper that I place in contact with the soils of the former Kodak factory in Vincennes. These soils have not been decontaminated. Some areas remain particularly polluted, impacting residents' health to the extent that a primary school had to close in the 2000s due to cases of leukemia.

With ongoing attention to life environments, I aim to rethink image-making processes, exploring, as with phytographs or chromatographies, less toxic and more environmentally respectful techniques.

For new exploration sites, I will stay more local, in Île-de-France. I have begun collaborating with a new group of researchers—including engineers, anthropologists, urban historians, residents, and farmers. Within the framework of the OCAPI research program at the École des Ponts et Chaussées, we are exploring the agricultural use of human urine. For my part, I will trace the circulation of this bodily fluid from plate to field. Each photographic series will be printed on paper made from the fibers of plants fertilized by the nitrogen present in the human urine of the photographed participants.

In this way, the project aims to reveal a new web of organic relations between Greater Paris inhabitants and the surrounding environments that sustain us and that we, in turn, could nourish differently. Through investigation and the materiality of images, I intend to make tangible the material and symbolic continuities between residents’ bodies and the soils of the Paris region.