Flowers of fire

The Fleurs de feux project is supported by the Spot Home Gallery (Naples) and the Photography & Sciences Prize supported by La Résidence 1+2, with the support of the Ministry of Culture, in partnership with ADAGP, the CNRS, Stimultania Pôle de photographie as well as the media partners Fisheye and Sciences et Avenir – La Recherche. Anaïs Tondeur is a MIRA laureate of the Institut français.

Exhibition supported by the DRAC Grand Est, the Grand Est Region and the City of Strasbourg.

Dear Anaïs. You may be surprised to receive this letter, you who have become accustomed to being a ferryman. I hope you will find an interpreter to read it to you during one of your travels. During the jury for the Photography & Science Prize (which we are supporting for the second time), I discovered the many footprints you collect. I understood your friendships and the trajectory of your steps. With them—your friends, philosophers, activists, and scientists—you know how to read traces, whether marked with cesium-137, strontium-90, phenol, or carbon. Your curiosity seems to know no bounds. The ground you walked this time, with Cristina, Ciro, Michael, and these women and men on the move, is even more scoured than after an eruption.

For, in reality, the Land of Fires is not a scorched earth but a diseased land. Rocks of the grave, radioactive dust, toxic persistence, chemical sap, poison from the dump on mobile and immobile living beings. You thought you were in Naples, but you were still in Chernobyl. You, the traveler, you looked at twigs, bindweed, dandelions, and eucalyptus trees and became their messenger.

Dear Anaïs, I am speaking to you again. “Fight or flight is not enough; together, we must invent a way of survival, of defusing, that can become a way of life. Every day, I learn from you and your loved ones […]”*

Celine Duval

Letter 3, letter to the dandelion, in the air between Paris and Bilbao, April 26, 2024, Michael Marder

In collaboration with the philosopher Michael Marder

This correspondence took shape with nine plant communities that evolve in soils marked by the incineration and burial of illegal waste, in Tierra del Fuego, in the Naples region. In a philosophical and photographic process, the artist Anaïs Tondeur and the philosopher Michael Marder seek to nourish new forms of inter-species care and attention.

Interweaving photography and ecology, botany and philosophy, this project is developed in partnership with plants that grow in the extreme soils of the Anthropocene.

Guided by the inhabitants of Terra dei Fuochi, in the Naples region, this project takes shape in a correspondence between the artist Anaïs Tondeur, the philosopher Michael Marder and communities of plants that healed the inhabitants before the eruption of Vesuvius, at the beginning of our era and that today participate in healing the soils of Campania, marked by the incineration and burial of illegal and toxic waste.

In an experimental and ecological photographic protocol, this encounter through the image took place without any other intervention than a contact between the elements present via a phytography process. Following the activation of the phenol molecules present in its fibers, the plant is invited to leave its imprint on the photosensitive surface (a paper or textile collected in the landfill and then sensitized to light).

Without removing the plant from its environment, this photographic gesture collects an excess of phenol, exacerbated by the presence of heavy metals in the soils of Campania.
Then, reconnecting with the ritual of the poet and herbalist Emily Dickinson, who slipped a dried plant into her correspondence, Anaïs Tondeur successively sends these other-than-human writings to the philosopher of plant thought Michael Marder, who responds with a letter addressed to each plant. Upon receipt, she returns to the plant to read the philosopher's words to it while simultaneously collecting a new phytographic imprint of the plant.

From leaf to leaf, these attentions by word and image, are developed in the sense of the medieval etymology of the term correspondence, that is, "to harmonize with, to get in touch with". They thus seek to develop a way of connecting with the singular existences of the plants of the Land of Fires while learning from their existences on the margins, nourishing new forms of inter-species care.

The residency was enriched by exchanges and visits with the following researchers and diplomats:

In France
Zoran Cerovic & Gwendal Latouche, phenol specialists, botanists, Ecology, Systematics and Evolution Laboratory, Paris Saclay University

In Naples
Lise Moutoumalaya (Consul of Naples), Simonetta Giordano, Professor of Environmental and Applied Botany, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Antonio Di Gennaro, Territorialist Agronomist, Valérie Huet and Priscilla Munzi, archaeologists from the Jean Bérard Center (CNRS, School of Rome), Eric Morvillez, archaeologist and historian of ancient Roman gardens currently on secondment in Naples

In Pompeii
Chiara Comegna & Valeria Amoretti, archaeobotany (Laboratorio di Ricerche Applicate 'A. Ciarallo' Parco Archeologico di Pompei)

This project was made possible thanks to meetings and surveys guided by residents and activists Ciro Teodonno, Alessandro Cannavacciuolo, Enzo Petrella, Maria Rosaria Esposito, Anna Rachele Ranieri, Virginia Petrellese, Rita Stellato, Rosanna Leone, Vittorio and Vincenzo Moccia.

Anaïs Tondeur. Born in 1985. Works and lives in Paris. In an approach rooted in ecological thought, Anaïs Tondeur is engaged in an interdisciplinary practice through which she explores new ways of telling the world, bringing transformations in our relationship to other living beings and to the great cycles of the earth. Composing a kind of laboratory of attentions, she thus develops a work through investigation and fiction, presented in the form of walks, installations, photographs or protocols associated with alchemy. She questions, through imploding worlds, the profound interdependencies that connect our human existences to the fabric of life, through a work of the image developed in a mode of production as connected and respectful as possible with living environments, and this, by means of photographic protocols, sensitive experiences or speculative narratives, presented in the form of installations or collective surveys. At the forefront of her practice are elusive elements of the earth and our bodies, namely radioactive traces, particles of black carbon, plants marked by nuclear trauma, a smell from the depths of geological time, human tears – all these elements underscoring the inextricability between our bodies and the world. She encounters these elements and these beings in places marked by human activity - plant populations evolving in the extreme soils of the Anthropocene with polluted skies, from the depths of a former silver mine to the wastelands of the Kodak factory in Vincennes - spaces where “the ruins are not inert, but alive with residues surprisingly charged with potential” as Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou points out.. She thus seeks to develop with these residues new sensitive alliances, alternative forms of (toxic) relationships and photographic materialities. allowing us to think about our relationships with the earth in order to better heal them. A graduate of Central Saint Martin (2008) and the Royal College of Arts (2010) in London, recipient of the honorable mention of the Friends of the Albert Kahn Garden (2024), she is the winner of the Grand Prix RPBB (2024), the Photography and Sciences Prize (Residence 1+2, 2023), the MIRA artistic mobility support (French Institute 2023), the Art of Change 21 Prize and the Cyber Arts, Ars Electronica honorable mention (2019). She has presented and exhibited her work in international institutions such as the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the MAMAC (Nice), the Venice Biennale, the French Pavilion (Lieux Infinis), Kröller-Müller Museum (Netherlands), Museum Ostwall, Dortmund (Germany), Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe (Germany), Kunst Haus Wien (Austria), Chicago Art Center, Spencer Art Museum (USA), Choi Center (Beijing), Nam June Paik Art Center, Sungkok Art Museum (Seoul).