2024
Michel Blazy
La Cantine, 2024, Centre International d'Art et du Paysage - Ile de Vassivière/FR
Michel Blazy, La Cantine, artistic commission as part of the Nouveaux Commanditaires initiative, 2024. Photo : Centre International d’Art et du Paysage – Île de Vassivière
Clément Villiers, Réfectoire, film, 24 minutes, 2024 © Clément Villers

The former Chamet vacation center in Faux-la-Montagne, Creuse, France, has been abandoned since the late 2000s.
In 2018, it was taken over by a group of independent researchers who set up create and build a place for research and study.
In 2019, the group calls on CIAPV to accompany them in the commissioning of a work that questions the takeover of civilizational sites by new forms of life.

Chosen to respond to this commission, artist Michel Blazy is developing La Cantine, a garden of anticipation in the site’s former refectory. He treats the ruin as a living being in its own time, observing its movements and exchanges with other species. It becomes a new nurturing environment without human domination, a space of symbiosis and reconciliation between artifact and organic, between human, plant and animal.

Commissioned as part of the Nouveaux commanditaires program,
Lac du Chamet, Plateau de Millevaches.
Sponsors: Center for Forest Research and Study.
With the support of Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso Foundation, the Fondation de France and the volunteers who participated in the production of the work.