Artists nominated for the COAL Student Prize

The COAL Student Prize 2025, also dedicated to freshwateraccompanies and supports young artists and students from French art and cultural schools, who imagine, experiment and propose concrete, creative solutions to ecological issues, through a residency program in partnership with the Nature Reserves of France. Supported since its inception by the French Ministry of Culture and the French Office for Biodiversity, the COAL Student Prize now benefits from a new partnership with MAIF.

THREE STUDENTS NOMINATED FOR THE STUDENT COAL AWARD

Khouloud Benzarti (Tunisia), Mapping an absence

Popline Fichot (France), L’orchestre des fuites – Le souffle des daphnies

Clara Niveau-Juteau (France), Fresque du Vivant

PROJECTS PRESENTATION

Khouloud Benzarti (Tunisia), Cartographie d’une absence

In Khouloud Benzarti‘s native Tunisia, water is scarce, unstable and fragmentary. It doesn’t flow from the tap as a matter of course; it has to be waited for, guessed at, saved and negotiated. It is never taken for granted. This fragile, sensory and sometimes anxious relationship with water has had a profound impact on his sensibility. With Cartographie d’une absence, she proposes a listening to fresh water in its most silent, fleeting and essential aspects; a poetics of presence. The artist plans to install a series of light devices in the landscape, seeking to reveal the fleeting states of freshwater: condensation, dew, beading, discreet trickling, ground humidity, ephemeral mist. Each device, duly documented, becomes an observation point for ordinary but often imperceptible manifestations, inviting us to restore our attention to elementary cycles, and to awaken gestures of care.

Born in Sousse in 1997, Khouloud Benzarti graduated from the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design TALM in Angers, and is currently studying at the Ecole d’Architecture de la Villette.

Popline Fichot (France), L’orchestre des fuites – Le souffle des daphnies

Fluorescein is a non-toxic material used in hydrology to trace underground watercourses and invisible leaks. Popline Fichot ‘s installation project materializes the path of water as it flows through a series of sculptures combining organic materials, metal structures and underground narratives. Following its faults and porous zones, the tinted water creates a hollowed-out drawing, telling tales of escape, fragility and resilience. Entirely eco-designed, dismountable and mainly made from reused materials, the project is rooted in the figure of the daphnia. This small translucent crustacean, which has the particularity of reproducing on its own by female cloning and fashioning its own armor against predators, is a bio-indicator and filter organism essential to the balance of our waters. The sculptures, inspired by the shapes of daphnia and their moults, become a poetic and political resurgence, blending aquatic ecology with stories of defending bodies.

Born in Paris in 1999, Popline Fichot holds a Master’s degree from the École Duperré in Paris, and is currently studying for a Master’s in design, creation and projects at the Césaap – Conférence des Écoles supérieures de Paris.

Clara Niveau-Juteau (France), Fresque du Vivant

To create new imagery that makes living things visible, and the militant commitment of those who fight to preserve them. This is Clara Niveau-Juteau‘s approach. With Fresque du vivant, she proposes the creation of a textile fresco using vegetable dyes, representing the rich biodiversity that populates the banks, waterways and wetlands of the nature reserve that will host it. Revealing the indivisible relationship between life and water, the work, created in dialogue with biologists, naturalists and reserve managers, will also be fertile in the literal sense. Inlaid with local seeds and/or organic elements that encourage biodiversity, it will ultimately be placed on the surface of the water, like a raft. On contact with the water, the dispersed seeds will initiate a form of riparian regeneration. This gesture, at once poetic, political and ritualistic, invites us to observe, learn, collaborate and sow, literally and figuratively.

Born in Niort in 2000, Clara Niveau-Juteau is a student at the Ecole Supérieure Européenne de l’Image in Poitiers.