In 2019, photographer Anne-Marie Filaire visited 6 sites operated by ECT. Today, ECT is very proud of the publication of this book, the fruit of its reporting.
Every year, 22 million tonnes of earth are excavated to build the metropolis and extend the boundaries of Paris.
Our collective imagination is imbued with the imposing image of the slag heaps of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, so we can visualize what the concept of « excavated earth » represents, and understand the visual impact and environmental issues we may be confronted with. Here, however, we’re not talking about black earth extracted from coal mines, but the diverse and colorful earth from the foundations of the many public works projects in Greater Paris, particularly those resulting from the tunnelling of the Grand Paris Express.
The stakes are threefold. Trace, sort and analyze all this land in motion; make fertile those that can be made fertile; and finally give them a destination in consultation with local authorities: parks, woods, sports fields, agricultural land in the city or areas of free development and biodiversity in the fields.
Anne-Marie Filaire has chosen to photograph the moment of land reception, by visiting six sites currently under construction in Greater Paris. The special moments when soil is dumped and distributed, and when landscape profiles are sketched out with the engineers. She takes a documented look at the sites, placing them in the context of the wider landscape, navigating between hundreds of trucks and construction equipment, returning several times to report on life on site on muddy, foggy or dry days. It’s a precious photographic work, which strives to show an in-between landscape, before it happens again. It is, she says, « working on the future ». His photographs tell of the intrinsic beauty of the sites, the beauty of their raw material, but also reveal their morphology.
Beyond the purely technical issues at stake, for an artist, the sum of the soil collected is also a potentially poetic object, out of time, a temporary universe that will fade away to make way for a new landscape. From this point of view, it’s also an artist’s book, revealing the many connections with contemporary art, especially Land Art.
Anne-Marie Filaire is a photographer. She has been preoccupied with the question of landscape for over twenty years, beginning with a series of photographs taken in her native Auvergne for the Observatoire photographique du paysage. Since 1999, she has been working extensively in the Middle East, Israel and East Africa, recounting the factual reality of interminable wars and the intimate concerns of populations in the face of geopolitical upheaval. His work is a poetic exploration of man and his environment. In 2017, she exhibited and published a work on demarcation zones(Zone de sécurité temporaire, Textuel/Mucem).
Claude Eveno is a filmmaker, urban planner and writer. He founded and directed the Cahiers du center de création industrielle magazine at the Centre Pompidou. He has taught in the urban planning department of Paris VIII University and at the École nationale supérieure de la nature et du paysage in Blois. He was also program advisor at France-Culture and Director of Studies at the Ecole nationale supérieure de création industrielle. He is the author of numerous books (recently published by Christian Bourgois Revoir Paris (2017), L’Humeur paysagère (2015).
A book published by Editions La Découverte / Dominique Carré
A literary event covered by the press
« Urbanisme : les déblais, belles terres à tout faire », an article by Aurore Coulaud published on September 21, 2020.
Listen to the Homo Hurbanicus radio broadcast of September 14, 2020, Terres, by Anne-Marie Filaire
« Sol profonds du Grand Paris », presentation of the book by Anne Marie Filaire and Claude Eveno.
« Photo Terres », an article by Christine Coste, published in the Jounal des Arts « L’oeil » broadcast on September 1, 2020.
