Se planter

What if we suddenly wanted to take root (se planter)? To forget ourselves for a while and just listen? In the middle of the Jardins de l’Europe, Karine Bonneval’s installation encourages us to try the disturbing experiment of listening to the world underground. How long could you tolerate feeling like a plant?

Slip your hands into the root system. That’s it, you’ve become a tree and taken root! Now just let yourself go, use your senses, and be ready to perceive the infinitesimal, to be one with the soil. You’ll get a sense of a world in constant movement, bursting with interactions, because healthy soil roars with the lives of a thousand organisms. For this installation, Bonneval recorded the sounds of invertebrates working the earth in and around Annecy. Take the time to listen to this microcosm teeming with activity around the roots. The company of plants is worth it. You won’t go wrong (se planter) by listening to the earth!

Born in 1970, visual artist Karine Bonneval lives and works in the Centre-Val de Loire region (France). Her work concerns the otherness of plants and human-plant interactions. Her installations mischievously divert scientific tools to create works with a hand-made feel. She creates works that offer imperfect, poetic translations of ways to interact differently with other living things.

She frequently exhibits her work in France and abroad (Nuit Blanche – Paris, Kunstwerk Carlshütte –Berlin, etc.). Her works can be found in public and private collections, including at the FRAC de Haute-Normandie, the château de Rivau, and the domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire.