THIERRY BOUTONNIER, WINNER OF THE 2010 COAL PRIZE

Thierry Boutonnier, Winner of the COAL Prize 2010, for his project Take Roots

Take Roots, by the artist Thierry Boutonnier, is part of the “urban contract for social cohesion” (CUCS) accompanying four years of rehabilitation work at the Eastern Entrance of Greater Lyon. Thierry Boutonnier proposes, in an ecological approach which implies the inhabitants, to lead concrete actions as the creation of an ecological place of dialogue, the implementation of an urban nursery, a pigeon-house, beehives and even a sheepfold. “It is by cohabiting with the species that I live my art. I stir the arable land during the construction of the Mermoz Nord neighborhood with the inhabitants in order to sow forms that connect them to this sensitive territory. My desire is to create a citizen gesture that cares for its environment and reaps the benefits.”
Thierry Boutonnier, born in 1980, lives and works in Lyon. He studied at the National School of Fine Art in Lyon and at Concordia University in Montreal. Today, he is pursuing a university degree in “Pollution and Nuisance” in Lyon. In 2009, he participated in the Lausanne Garden Festival, soon he will be selling fresh eggs at the Rennes Biennale. He is a non-specialist artist who experiments with the entanglements between “the economic, the social and the environmental” in order to recover the Political.