Being at the nature| Résonances art-science

The Third Resonance Axis

Throughout 2025, the Art-Science Resonances project develops around four thematic resonance axes: Being with the Cosmos, Being with the Virtual, Being with Nature, Being with the Body.

These axes will be deployed across the Université Paris-Saclay campus and with partner institutions: Le Cube Garges, Forum des Images, Musée des Arts et Métiers, and the Société Française de Radiologie.

For each axis, we envision:

• exhibitions in participating laboratories and with cultural and scientific partners;

• art-science “coupling days” (project presentations, workshops, round tables, debates), fostering exchanges and collaborations both within Université Paris-Saclay in an academic format and with partners in a public-oriented format.

 

 

Being at the nature

The Being at the nature axis runs from June to December 2025 and involves:

• the Institute for Diversity, Ecology and Evolution of Life (IDEEV) and its three laboratories: Ecology, Society and Evolution (ESE), Evolution, Genomes, Behavior and Ecology (EGCE), and Quantitative Genetics and Evolution (GQE);

• the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences (LSCE);

• the Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Digital Sciences (LISN);

• and the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, one of the oldest technical and industrial museums in the world, which hosted the Carbon Footprint exhibition during the 2024–2025 cultural season.

As part of this axis and Nuit Blanche 2025, the museum hosted the art-science installation L’Air de rien from June 7 to June 17.

For three months, laboratories will host art-science works to spark curiosity, encourage dialogue, stimulate interaction, and invite broad participation in related events.

Several art-science coupling events open to the Université Paris-Saclay community and laboratory staff are organized:

• September 26, 2025 | 9:00–11:00: art-science breakfast with artists, scientists, and LSCE staff

• October 13, 2025 | 9:00–11:00: art-science breakfast with artists, scientists, and IDEEV staff

• November 4, 2025 | 9:30–19:00: public art-science coupling day at IDEEV

• November 13, 2025 | 12:30–14:00: art-science coffee session at LISN

Nuit Blanche - 7 June 2025 - musée des Arts et Métiers

Being at the nature | musée des Arts et Métiers

L’Air de rien, a new art-science pathway, was created for Nuit Blanche 2025 (June 7) and remained open until June 17.

It is a journey “with head in the clouds and feet on the ground,” featuring two works:

• Perturbatio, reflecting the transformation of ecosystems caused by collective human activity

• The Air of Pollen, revealing pollen grains as markers of life’s adaptability

This installation closed the museum’s season while inaugurating the third axis: Being with Nature.

During Nuit Blanche, artists and scientists (Béatrice Albert, Charles Menard, Guillaume Junot, Ikse Maître, Nadia de Bernardi, Tim Schneider, Vincent Hulot) were present.

Approximately 3,400 visitors attended on June 7.

Being at the nature | IDEEV

Dans le cadre de l'axe de résonance Être à la nature, l’IDEEV participe avec l'exposition de :

OuCLiPo

Mariejulie Bourgois

A speculative project rethinking innovation by anticipating consequences upstream of technological processes. It uses fiction to question technological solutionism and its implications for society and ecology.

Associated works:

• Nubus Start-up

• FakeCLoud Artivist Collective

• Interactive installation Homogenitus

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Cosmologie Virale

Marie Truffier

A large metal net hosts a viral crowd; clay elements absorb and diffuse transformations; cracked cones tell stories. Viral Cosmology immerses us in a spectral world from millions of years ago – but whose history persists deep within our flesh. In this blurred zone, where it is no longer possible to grasp where the boundaries of things end, processes intertwine and recount the plasticity of those who live, invisibly, with, against and among us.

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Perturbatio 

[Concept] Charles Ménard-Wendling
[Concept & developpement] Tim Schneider

Perturbatio is a participatory installation that aims to make visible the emergence of cumulative effects of individual actions on our environment. The public is invited to reflect on new scales and faces the difficult task of linking seemingly trivial activities to their global consequences. Perturbatio seeks to prompt reflection on our entanglement within the social, technical and cultural systems that surround us. Etymologically, perturbatio refers to “the introduction of irregularities into a system.” Variations are a fundamental process of life that enable biological evolution and physical dynamics. However, beyond a certain threshold and scale, these perturbations endanger the fragile balance of life on Earth to which we belong. Like an imprint of our collective busyness, Perturbatio reflects the decentralized and collective nature of the ecological crisis.

En savoir plus

 

La Grande Échelle 

[Conception] Jérémy Jacob, Benjamin Cadon, Nada Caud
[Création graphique] Olivier Morvan

La Grande Échelle aims to make playful and accessible the small and large spatial and temporal scales necessary to understand climate phenomena and environmental issues. An immersive experience in which the participant uses their body to move through time and space, better grasp changes of scale and understand environmental issues through this device resulting from the collaboration of researchers, artists and developers. The first iteration of this installation concerns the evolution of atmospheric CO? content from –800,000 years to the present day, based on research conducted within the ICOS project.

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L’Air du pollen

[Conception céramique] Béatrice Albert, Nadia de Bernardi
[Scénographie] Ikse Maître
[Composition sonore] Vincent Hulot
[Développement numérique] Tim Schneider

About ten ceramic sculptures suspended in space, representing pollen grains enlarged to an extreme, as if escaped from a celestial herbarium. They appear inert, rigorous, almost scientific, and reveal hidden textures and fragile roughness. Each pollen grain tells a story; together they speak to us about biodiversity. The wonder of this unsuspected microscopic life questions its fragility and its future.

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Solastalgies

Araks Sahakyan

Solastalgias is a series of drawings begun in 2023 at the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences. The series emerged from Araks Sahakyan’s interactions with climatologists and scientists from the laboratory. She wanted to draw snow, ice, cold with many colors. Using felt-tip pens, this is not a simple task, since there are not many light colors. She also wanted to reflect on what colors might be in the future after all the changes occurring on the planet. She wanted to understand what colors would be like if we were to use biogeoengineering which, as we know, can transform light and therefore colors. Drawing melting glaciers is like making a parallel with the memory of the skin, which could also melt and disappear like a glacier. Glaciers for the planet are like skin for the body, boundaries between an inner world and the outer world, the intimate and the collective.

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Being at the nature | LSCE

Dendromité

[Conception] Claire Damesin, Karine Bonneval
[Montage] Gabrielle Reiner
[Son] Jean-Michel Ponty
Production Light Cone, catalogue Collectif Jeune Cinéma

Dendromity establishes a relationship between the breathing of a human body and that of a tree. The space of the film is inspired by measurement chambers that make it possible to isolate a zone of the plant in order to record and then analyze its gas exchanges with the atmosphere. In a “chamber” at the scale of a tree trunk, a specific thermal camera made it possible to make visible the human and tree respirations. A sensitive relationship is established between the two bodies, transforming the scientific experience into a sensual and poetic experience. The viewer, like the character in the film, finds themselves in a “chamber” with the tree; they are invited to share its intimacy.

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Arboresciences

[Artistes photographes] Julie Audic & Christian Rizk
[Écophysiologiste] Claire Damesin

The exhibition Arboresciences is an invitation to reflect on the theme of the tree as a living being in continuous connection with its immediate surroundings. It proposes a crossing of perspectives on the interactions between art and science.

By bringing scientific research and artistic approach into dialogue, new perceptions open up to discover a mysterious part of the tree that is both sensitive and rational, inviting us to wander between scientific precision and artistic dreamlike quality. The gaze is then carried toward other horizons, visible as well as invisible, where a highlighting of the tree is revealed in the form of “photographic illuminations.” This word borrowed from the Middle Ages carries within it the idea of light. It is a highlighting, a kind of luminous re-revelation akin to photography.

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La Jungle

Araks Sahakyan

In La Jungle, Araks Sahakyan conducts a research on the jungle that inhabits inside and outside her body and her brain. Warming stripes, windows, red balloons or even The Rape of Proserpina… with this drawing conceived partly at the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, she wanted to understand the interferences of different types of violence: wars, violations, climate catastrophes, losses, and how these violences leave traces on our skin.

It is a research on the jungle that inhabits inside and outside my body and my brain. Warming stripes, windows, red balloons or even The Rape of Proserpina… with this drawing conceived partly at the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, I wanted to understand the interferences of different types of violence: wars, violations, climate catastrophes, losses, and how these violences leave traces on our skin.

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Oceans layers

Araks Sahakyan

Inspired by oceanographic research and by her encounters with oceanographers who told her about their missions on the Marion Dufresne, one of the largest scientific research vessels in the world, Araks Sahakyan questions the ocean as an intimate territory where our fears are both deep and clearly visible.

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Enigma

Sami Korhonen

The more we respect the environment, the more it takes care of us.
This video artwork deals with the calm that is necessary to restore this relationship and to understand, once and for all, that nature has no problem taking back its power, reclaiming its rights.

 

Being at the nature | LISN

As part of the Being at the Nature resonance axis, the LISN participates with the exhibition of Perturbatio.

 

Art-science coupling day

Tuesday November 4, 2025 from 9:30 to 19:00 – Free

IDEEV – Institute for Diversity, Ecology and Evolution of Life – 12 rue 128, 91190 Gif-sur-Yvette

The art-science coupling day of Being at the Nature is designed to foster resonances between scientists, artists and both cultural and scientific institutions. The program of this event is particularly rich. Click on the button below to discover the program and register.

The objective of the day is to:

• Present ongoing works and art-science works related to nature

• Stimulate debate around art-science research through conferences, workshops and discussions

• Explore new interdisciplinary approaches

These meetings are an opportunity to cross perspectives, to experiment and to create together new bridges between art and science, highlighting the diversity of approaches and contributions.

Program

 

Speakers 

Ikse Maître

Ikse | Xavier Maître is a physicist and researcher at the CNRS at the Multimodal Biomedical Imaging Laboratory of Paris-Saclay (BioMaps, CEA, CNRS, Inserm, Université Paris-Saclay). His early research focused on the foundations of quantum mechanics as well as on the mechanisms of quantum entanglement and decoherence. Today, he combines atomic physics and medical physics to develop new tools for exploring the human body. He coordinates the European innovation project V|LF-Spiro3D on 3D magnetic resonance spirometry.

Ikse Maître initiated the science-art-society group Le sas, within which he conducts art-science research based on unconstrained human-machine interaction. He develops art-science experiments and relies on shifts in reality to test our relationships with the world and engage the public. He also coordinates the work package on immersive technologies for the European cultural heritage project Artcast4D and studies the keys to immersion in public space at the Forum des Images, through the installation Ariadne’s Fibres.

 

Tim Schneider

Tim Schneider was trained in high-energy physics and holds a PhD in radiotherapy and hadrontherapy. Having moved toward the field of art-science, his research at Université Paris-Saclay is now focused on immersive installations in open spaces and on the study of new approaches for systems tracking people and movement. In addition, he is a member of the collective Le sas where he works mainly on the creation and development of interactive digital art works and experiences.

 

Christian Delécluse

Christian Delécluse conceives artistic creation as a praxis integrating sensitivity and reason, thus going beyond traditional dualism. Passionate about the co-evolution between humans and their tools, he invents “sensitive machines” that reflect the spectator back to their own subjectivity and invite us to transform our representations of the world. His approach, both political and subversive, seeks to go beyond the boundaries of thought by creating an unprecedented synchronism between art, science and the sacred. Through works such as Hic Sunt Dracones, he explores the tension between gravity and freedom, offering multisensory experiences that re-examine our relationships with nature and structures of domination.

 

Karine Bonneval

For about ten years, Karine Bonneval’s projects — installations, listening devices, collective practices — engage the body: ours, human, and that of plants. Through these attempts at duo, she explores the possibilities of a sensory dialogue, inscribed in a shared temporality, where our perceptions may, for a moment, come together.

 

Claire Damesin 

Claire Damesin holds a position at Université Paris-Saclay within the ESE laboratory (Ecology, Society and Evolution) in the “Plant Ecophysiology” team. After more than 20 years working on forest trees as an ecophysiologist, since 2015 she has been developing an ecology of human relations to nature and laying the foundations of an introspective ecology.

Christian Rizk & Julie Audic

Christian Rizk & Julie Audic are photographic artists. They have worked as a duo for about twenty years with a plastic photography approach and have developed a singular technique without retouching or trickery called Intensive Photography.

Fanny Rybak

Fanny Rybak is a lecturer-researcher in the Acoustic Communications team (Paris-Saclay Neuroscience Institute). She teaches biology and animal diversity, field biology and ethology. She is strongly attached to an in situ approach to living organisms.

 

Hélène Courvoisier

Deciphering the language of birds is the objective of the research conducted by Hélène Courvoisier, lecturer-researcher at Université Paris-Sud attached to the Paris-Saclay Neuroscience Institute.

Araks Sahakyan

Araks Sahakyan (1990) is a transdisciplinary artist based in Paris. Raised in Spain. Born in Armenia. Currently in residence at the Scène de Recherche ENS Paris-Saclay.

 

Sophie Nadot

Through phylogenetic and developmental approaches, I seek to characterize the patterns of evolution of flower form and pollen, and to identify factors contributing to diversification.

 

Céline Riauté

Deputy director in charge of Planning and Environment. Objective: Campus 2030.

 

Teurk

Teurk is a French contemporary artist who lives and works in Paris. He draws his inspiration from experimentation in all its forms.

 

Davide Faranda

I am CNRS research director in climate sciences at LSCE and head of the ESTIMR group working on extreme weather events.

Béatrice Albert

Lecturer-researcher at Université Paris-Saclay, studying plant forms and their reproductive success.

 

Nadia de Bernardi

Designer who now pursues her creative path through ceramics.

 

Mariejulie Bourgeois

Digital artist & designer, PhD in aesthetics, science and technologies of the arts, and lecturer.

 

Marie Truffier

Artist, designer and agrégée in design, developing research on microbial imaginaries.

 

Charles Ménard

Visual artist and PhD candidate exploring the Anthropocene.

 

Jérémy Jacob

CNRS research director at LSCE working on environmental diagnostics and ecosystems.

 

Anaïs Raynaud

Curator and project manager at the Musée des Arts et Métiers.