\r\nAt a time when the various impacts of the Anthropocene are becoming apparent, a Namur residency has allowed two art researchers to explore critically and creatively the relationships we maintain with the environment. An opportunity to stimulate ecological awareness raising at the point where the sciences and the arts overlap.\r\n<\/p>\n\n\n
The Bomel Abattoirs, a stone\u2019s throw from the Namur train station. It is there that the Namur Cultural Centre (CCN) has now been established, a hub which hosts art and sociocultural projects in particular. It is also there that we arranged to meet Dewi Brunet<\/a> and Carlos Sfeir<\/a>. The two artists were selected to take part in the \u2018Imagining Ecological Futures\u2019 residency, which came to a close on May 21, after a month engaged in artistic research. Whilst neither of their respective creative universes predestined their paths to ever cross, the issues this residency has focused on have very much been on their minds for several years now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How to reduce our ecological footprint, or even decolonise nature? What shape would new models of coexistence between human and non-human species take? How to reduce the imbalance between nature and culture whilst reintroducing sensitivity.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Dewi Brunet, a Brussels-based creative who specialises in the art of the fold, describes how he has gradually introduced these issues into his artistic process. He has been practising origami for around fifteen years and in particular explores Oribotics. A domain at the crossroads of origami and robotics pioneered by its creator, Matthew Gardiner. \u2018Folding is simultaneously a technique, a means of expression, and a field of multidisciplinary research. My projects today are centred on the sensitive relationship between the living world and technologies and often lead me to ask the following questions: what is a living being? What is a machine?\u2019 At some distance from this Manichean opposition, the analogies between folding and the world around us are numerous. \u2018It is enough to consider the recesses of the soul or the folds of the skin, the pleats within mountain ranges, or within molecular structures. Nature is intelligently folded,\u2019 adds the artist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The fold and its intrinsic links to the living world in themselves enable us to get a better grasp of the environmental issues, but folding also provides another perspective on the ways we relate to nature. The fold artist for that matter avows he has been inspired both by the words by the environment philosopher Baptiste Morizot, who fights against \u2018an impoverishment of the range of relationships we can maintain with the rest of the living world,\u2019 and by biomimicry \u2013 a process which consists of observing nature and the living world in order to draw inspiration from it and innovate, and which we have discussed here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n