Visual artist Caroline Le Méhauté and choreographer Isabella Soupart presents Tellus project, an installation performance at the crossroads of art and biology, or bio-art. Bio-art is a contemporary art movement that uses the plastic resources offered by biotechnology as a medium. The project invites us to rethink our relationship with the living and to question our practices through art. Taking the earth beneath our feet as their starting point, the artists draw on the fact that 75% of our planet’s soil is now polluted. United by their shared concern for the environment and for materials, the duo is setting up in Centrale and is collaborating with a special material: polluted excavated earth.

Tellus project is a research project initiated by Caroline Le Méhauté. Based on her overwhelming observations, she directed her research towards other practices. Phytoremediation is a gentle, slow method of helping to remedy polluted earth. It involves the absorption of pollutants from the soil by hyper-accumulative plants, which are capable of filtering and degrading some of the pollutants. As well as being a symbolic and poetic act, creation can play a part in ’care’, in building resilience in the living world.

In Tellus project, choreographer Isabella Soupart invites a group of dancers to take turns in a physical, rhythmic and spellbinding test of endurance, interacting individually or collectively as they confront the polluted earth that can no longer be ‘hidden’: piles of earth are shaped, transformed, moved and carved, in turn. The audience is invited to share in this unique and hypnotic experience, individually defining their own time dedicated to this performance. Tellus Project is a choreography of bodies and sculptures/ installations, endlessly reconfigured.