Artists nominated for the COAL 2024 Prize

Fifteen years after its creationThe COAL Prize returns to its roots to reveal the power of art not only to alert and denounce, but also to repair and connect through gestures of care and sharing in the face of the global ecological crisis. At a time when knowledge alone is no longer enough to motivate action, The Prix COAL 2024 calls for transformation from within, of the senses, of care, of oneself with others. The ten artists nominated for the Prix COAL 2024 and the three students nominated for the Prix COAL étudiant deploy restorative practices, We offer a wide range of activities: individual and group reconnection; somatic, sensory and spiritual reconnection; hand and earth skills; often in atypical, non-institutional cultural settings, veritable open-air laboratories where we can experiment with concrete, realistic ecotopias for better living together.

The COAL 2024 Prize’s international call for projects invites artists to take up the subject Transforming gathered 766 artist submissions. This success once again reflects the artists’ strong commitment to the environment and ecological issues.

THE TEN ARTISTS NOMINATED FOR THE 15TH EDITION OF THE COAL PRIZE

C.A.R (Cellule d’Action Rituelle) (France), A Cycle

Fabrice Cazenave (France), Hyper-balades

Lélia Demoisy (France), Cedrus deodara

Pascal Ferren (France), Mission Relations

Carla Gueye (France), Corps Immergés

Nuno da Luz (Portugal),
Feral Songbook

Mitrcollective (France/Russia/United Kingdom), MITR (Made in the River)

Marina Pirot & Dominique Leroy (France), SLABS / SHOW-PATATES EN SLABS

Sacha Rey (France), The current situation

Yan Tomaszewski (France/Poland), Sequana

COAL 2024 AWARDS CEREMONY and WITHOUT RESERVATION,

A FLAGSHIP EVENT FOR THE ECOLOGICAL ARTS SCENE

Rendezvous on November 20 for the COAL Awards ceremony for the second edition of Sans Réserve, the meeting place for creative artists committed to ecology..
COAL convie ainsi à l’occasion de ce nouvel artistic and festive event, professionals and the general public to a day of encounters, performances, workshops and experiments for a unique and unifying gathering of the new artistic scene committed to ecology.

AWARDS

–The COAL Prize-winning artist receives an endowment of 12,000 euros and a creative residency at the heart of the Domaine de Belval, owned by the François Sommer Foundation, led by the scientific and educational teams of the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature and the Domaine de Belval. Located in the commune of Belval-Bois-des-Dames, in the French Ardennes, the Domaine de Belval is a veritable observatory of rurality and wildlife, welcoming artists each year selected for their contribution to renewing the vision of the relationship between humans and their natural environment.

–The winner of the Jury’s Special Prize receives a prize of 3,000 euros.

– The winning artist of the mention Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles/Paris will receive 2,000 euros and will be invited to exhibit at the Paris institution.

–The artist awarded the Ateliers Médicis prize benefits from a residency in Clichy-sous-Bois/Montfermeil in connection with the Bondy regional forest. Les Ateliers Médicis welcomes artists of all disciplines for residencies, and supports the creation of works of art conceived in connection with local communities. They encourage or organize meetings between artists and residents.

-Student COAL Award Winner receives a two-month residency in one of France’s 350 Nature Reserves, with a prize of 5,000 euros. The winning candidate will be supported throughout their residency by the nature reserve’s educational and scientific teams as they implement their project.

PRESENTATION OF THE TEN ARTISTIC PROJECTS NOMINATED FOR THE COAL 2024 – TRANSFORMING AWARD

La C.Δ.R (Cellule d’Action Rituelle) (France), A Cycle

Collective and research unit formed in January 2019 by -h- and the Laboratoire d’Imagination Insurrectionnelle at the Notre-Dame-des-Landes ZAD, The C.Δ.R studies the question of ritual and the issues it raises in the construction of a territory and a community. By working closely with the inhabitants of the ZAD and developing practices that meet their needs for common action, the project aims to develop a form of transmission of these experiences to nourish other possibilities, other tangibles, in other places. The C.Δ.R brings together the Laboratoire d’Imagination Insurectionnelle and the collective -h-. The former, created by Isa Frémeaux and Jay Jordanis famous for its art-activist actions, such as mass disobedience by bicycle during COP15, the recruitment of an army of rebel clowns, and the launch of a rebel raft regatta to block a coal-fired power plant. The second collective brings together Nath Gélard and Thibaud Guichard and is interested in knowledge, both in its history and practice, as well as in the elements that tell the story of the world through a variety of media such as installation and publishing.

Fabrice Cazenave (France), Hyper-balades

Fabrice Cazenave has developed a hypnotic trance process based on drawing.
Alone or in a group, his Hyper-balades are an experience of somatic, sensory and spiritual reconnection, enabling you to connect with the energies of the beings and spaces you visit. Experience reveals how an environment can transform us through the sensations it gives us, and how our history, cognitive biases, knowledge and beliefs can distort our perceptions and understanding of the world and living things.

Born in 1975, Fabrice Cazenave began ballet at a very early age, joining Claude Bardouil’s company from 1998 to 2004, while continuing his studies at the Beaux-Arts de Toulouse. He has been working in the visual and somatic arts since 2006. He has had several solo and group exhibitions in France and abroad, at Bathurst (Australia), Drawing Lab, Musée Picasso and Galerie Sono in Paris.

Lélia Demoisy (France), Cedrus deodara

Dismayed by the killing of a Cedrus deodara (Himalayan Cedar) that had accompanied her all her life, Lélia Demoisy has chosen to honor the intimate ties that bind it to this other-than-human being, through the creation of a body of work born of its pollen, cones, bark, trunks and branches. Practicing healing to combat solastalgia, she celebrates the regenerative potential of the plant kingdom by germinating her seeds. The result is an offspring that she hopes to spread over a wider area through a process of living works of art.

Born in 1991, Lélia Demoisy graduated from Arts Décoratifs de Paris in 2015. She exhibits and creates monumental installations in emblematic locations such as the Parc National des Forêts, the Parc de la Villette, the Potager du Roi in Versailles and the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire. She is represented by Galerie By Lara Sedbon.

Pascal Ferren (France), Mission Relations

The Relations Mission is transformative research-creation. The idea is to carve out of the raw material of existing public policies and their relationship to the living a potentially desirable form of alternative administration anchored in sensitive relations between the living, and to develop situated devices such as a council of environmental interpreters, celebrations of nature, performative concertations, interspecific mediations, sensitive landscaping projects, and so on. In the face of ecology’s manifest difficulties in combating climate upheaval and the collapse of biodiversity, this approach aims to create a toolbox for transforming the forms of nature administration produced by contemporary institutions.

Pascal Ferren is a philosopher by training, urban planner by profession and author of eco-fictional devices. Co-founder of the Camille Alfada agency (a user management consultancy) and of Lichen (a laboratory of interdependencies between humans and non-humans), he designs surveys and collaborative processes to help users of the world, both human and non-human, to take account of their needs in the development of their environment.

Carla Gueye (France), Corps Immergés

These collective efforts at repair and care are often led by women, and it is to their role and courage that Carla Gueye pays tribute. Carla Gueye with her project Corps Immergés. The project will take place in the mangrove swamps of Senegal’s Petite Côte, a region where the predominant economic activity is artisanal oyster farming, with women accounting for 90% of the workforce. Opening up new possibilities for the use of natural materials in design, Carla Gueye has created a series of sculptures based on the reactivation of the neglected skills of traditional oyster farming, allowing us to observe the free forms created by the birth of oysters, depending on the currents and the environment in which the pieces are placed.

Carla Gueye, born in 1997 in Angoulême, is a multidisciplinary artist based in Paris, who graduated from the École d’art de Cergy in 2022. Her work, which explores the intimate, resonates with a plural family history enriched by three cultural spheres (Africa, Asia, Europe). Her aim is to develop an emotional “habitable art”, inseparable from life and as close as possible to a social and artistic ecology. His work was showcased at the 100% 2024 exhibition at La Villette.

Nuno da Luz (France/Portugal), Feral Songbook

Instilling change that is inseparably individual and communal, with those other than ourselves and those other than humans, by trusting in the potential of experience in all its dimensions: this is the approach that Nuno da Luz proposes to explore through the study of accelerated transformations of urban sonospheres in Europe. He is particularly interested in the massive implantation of an exotic bird in our European cities: the parakeet. With Feral Songbookthe artist has created a sound pedagogy manual detailing a series of collective improvisations that appropriate the parakeets’ “singing territories” as the ultimate mode of collaboration and polyphonic cooperation.

The work of Nuno da Luz, an artist and researcher born in Lisbon in 1984, undulates between the ecologies of noise, attentive listening and the creation of books. In 2015, he attended the Master of Experimentation Program in Arts and Politics at SciencesPo Paris. Resident at the Cité Internationale des Arts in 2024, he is currently carrying out a doctoral research project at the UCP School of the Arts (Porto), entitled “Echologies of Noise”, and exhibits regularly in Europe.

Mitrcollective (France/Russia/United Kingdom), MITR (Made in the River)

MITR (Made In The River) explores the possibilities of collaborative creations between the Aygalades stream – which runs through Marseille’s northern districts, then empties into the sea north of La Joliette – and its riparian communities, with a view to transforming the future of the watercourse and our relationship with it. The project invites us to experience a complex ecosystem from a non-human perspective, through the collection of hybrid materials shaped by contaminated water. Through visual works, live performances, rituals and audiovisual creations, it bears witness to a history parallel to that of ecological disaster: that of the cunning, ingenuity and inventiveness of water.

Founded in 2019 by the three artists Charlie Fox, Chloé Mazzani and Bulat Sharipovthe MITR collective collective has set itself the mission of participating in the ecological restoration of this urban river, which flows through industrialized areas and is particularly prone to chemical pollution and the accumulation of macro-waste.

Marina Pirot and Dominique Leroy (France), SLABS

In a greenhouse growing vegetables on their Kerminy farm, Marina Pirot & Dominique Leroy hybridize agricultural and artistic practices, sound and somatic arts to better perceive how the environment affects the body.
Daily agricultural practice generates the writing of somatic market gardening body scores, where agricultural gestures and postures allow the body’s systems of sensations to act, exploring them in various combinations in the sound environment of the farm. Slabs. Scores are activated and shared during collective and festive rituals such as picking.

Since 2015, artist duo Marina Pirot & Dominique Leroy have been deploying a collaborative artistic platform, declining various forms of cooperation, committed to aesthetic transition in the light of ecological mutations. The duo’s commitment since 2018 to the interweaving of agricultural and artistic issues has led them to long residencies on market garden sites (Nantes, Bolinas-California, KRA-Czech Republic) before creating their experimental art micro-farm, Cyclo-farm in Kerminy, (Brittany).

Sacha Rey (France), The current situation

Sasha Rey imagines an “ethological road trip” that questions the relationship humans have with the collective and with other forms of life. This exploration, based on the specificity of a protected Mediterranean species, the pink flamingo, is intended to forge inter-species alliances in which non-humans and the emancipation demands of minoritized people discover common issues, inviting our society to transform itself. This documentary looks at the struggle for transgender rights and the defense of ecosystems, particularly in relation to water management.

Born in Nice in 1991, Sacha Rey is a visual artist who graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris with honors. He also defended a dissertation on his working methodology, “danse documentaire”, at EHESS Paris. Sacha has taken part in group shows and festivals such as Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, La Villette, Villa Vassilieff, Bétonsalon, CAC Brétigny, Poush Manifesto, as well as the Stadtmuseum (Düsseldorf) and the Spiral Wacoal Art Center (Tokyo).

Yan Tomaszewski (France/Poland), Sequana

Yan Tomaszewski proposes a renewal of the imaginary of the Seine by reactivating the memory of another possible relationship with the river, based on dialogue, care and the give-and-take protocol.
Starting with the thousands of ex-voto statues once offered to Sequanathe healing goddess of the Seine, he embarked on a global, long-term project based on the creation of multiple processes: sculptures to purify the Seine and measure its pollutants; gestures of offering and neo-Pagan rituals; co-creation of a collective of Gardien.ne.s de la Seine around the attribution of a legal personality to the river, participation in activist movements fighting against a gigantic destructive project on the banks of the Seine, scientific collaborations…

Yan Tomaszewski, born in 1984 in Seclin (Nord, France), is a Franco-Polish filmmaker and visual artist. Trained at the Beaux-Arts de Paris and the Studio national des arts contemporains du Fresnoy, his films have been shown at IDFA Amsterdam, FIFA Montreal, FID Marseille, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, MAC VAL in Vitry-sur-Seine and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles.

The Prix COAL 2024 is supported by the European Union via the Transformative Territories, Performing transition through the arts program, the French Ministry of Culture, the French Office for Biodiversity, ADEME, the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, the Fondation François Sommer, the Fondation LAccolade, and in partnership with the Ateliers Médicis, the Centre Wallonie Bruxelles/Paris and IHEPAT.