stepha.sagot@gmail.com

"Beginning in July, the vibrant and ecologically investigative watercolors of artist Stéphanie Sagot will fill the second floor of the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. Voyage en Terres Amoureuses opens with all the fullness of a summer harvest – teeming with life and foregrounding interconnectedness with the land, with all that grows, at once documenting resistance and mapping out enclaves of potentiality. Sagot’s large-format watercolors are at once maps and paintings of land usership and agroecological practice – depicting both what is and what might be –, fusing geopolitical, institutional and profoundly personal landscapes. They map what the artist calls “terres amoureuses” – loving lands – and the relationships that they nurture, taking their historical inspiration from Madeleine de Scudéry’s 1654 “Carte de tendre”, based on a visual geography of emotions. Over the course of Voyage en Terres Amoureuses, Sagot will produce a similar such map of the Künstlerhaus itself as an ecosystem, indeed as a kind of farm in its own right. Through workshops, observations and conversations with the farmership of the house, she will produce a new map portraying the Künstlerhaus Farm in its complex relational and physical landscape.

 

Of particular interest to Stéphanie Sagot is the Larzac plateau in southern France near her home, which, since the 1970s, has been a focal point of sustainable farming practices and agroecological experiments – and remains a hotbed of peasant-led resistance to monoculture, chemical-intensive agriculture, land appropriation and the militarization of “underused” or “empty” landscapes. In 1971, 103 smallholder farmers rose up against the expansion of a French military base on the plateau, an initiative to which Sagot pays tribute in her “Terre Amoureuse – Gardarem lo Larzac,” a carte de tendre that maps the Larzac today as a vital landscape of ongoing resistance. A Terre Amoureuse, and an emblem of the continued fight for the health of living soils, the free flow of rivers and the cultivation of a shared atmosphere."

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Tamarind Rossetti et Stephen Wright