memento vivere / opus 02

Jul 18, 2026 | editions en, local contemporain en

The Grenoble Museum is hosting and organizing—in collaboration with the laboratory linked to the University Hospital’s “Health Humanities” Chair and the Cresson_AAU research unit (CNRS, ENSAG-UGA)—a new series of conversations exploring the place of the dead within the world of the living. These dialogues bring together contemporary artists whose work reinterprets our mortal condition; healthcare professionals and practitioners who confront death and end-of-life care on a daily basis; anthropologists, philosophers, and biologists; and the general public.

It may seem paradoxical to speak of new ways of imagining death, given that it has haunted humanity since time immemorial. Yet, while the fundamental nature of the enigma remains unchanged, certain signs reveal how our representations and practices are evolving. This shift is driven by a more nuanced understanding of biological processes, as well as by the global acceleration of social change and ecosystemic instability—manifesting in everything from social media memorials dedicated to the deceased and makeshift roadside shrines to rituals adopted from other cultures or gestures that break free from established traditions.

How can we translate and share these new imaginaries within the public sphere? The presence of those who have passed away forms our matrix—our nourishing soil, that *humus* which shares its etymological roots with the words “humility” and “humanity.” No civilization could exist without this porous exchange of ideas and images passed down from one generation to the next. That is why we will engage in dialogue with authors and artists creating new forms and narratives, while also examining works from the Grenoble Museum’s collections; for the “new” is often unstable, and may well turn out to have been present all along.

The guests:

  • Pascal Convert, Visual artist, writer, filmmaker
  • Aurélia Zahedi, Visual artist
  • Sophie Zenon, Visual artist, historian, and sociologist
  • Eliane Umuhire, Artist
  • Jérémy Damian, Dancer, anthropologist
  • Laurence Loutre Barbier, Photographer, publisher at Fage Éditions, head of the alternative funeral service “Noir Clair”
  • Anne Carol, Historian of medicine and the body,
  • Anne Lasseur, Art Historian, Head of the Saint-Laurent archeological museum, Grenoble
  • Pierre Reboul, Writer, member of the Grenoble-based collective “Morts de rue et personnes isolées” (Street Deaths and Isolated Individuals)
  • Martin Julier-Costes, Socio-anthropologist
  • Cherry Schrecker, Sociologist
  • Marc Higgin, Anthropologist
  • Hélène Chaudeau, Independent funeral consultant
  • Heddi Bouti, Geriatrician
  • Abdel Ouacheria, Biologist and philosopher,

The moderators:

  • Julia Champey, Anesthesiologist-intensivist, head of the Grenoble branch of the Medical Humanities Chair (Psychiatry-Neurosciences GHU / Sorbonne), directed by Cynthia Fleury
  • Pascaline Thiollière, Architect, researcher specializing in urban planning and spaces of coexistence with the dead
  • Pauline Bouchet, Associate Professor at UGA (Grenoble), director of the Arts-Health program
  • Philippe Mouillon, Visual artist, exhibition curator, initiator of “Memento Vivere”

Since autumn 2025, the first two contemporary works produced as part of *memento vivere* have been on display at the Petit-Sablon cemetery in La Tronche, near the communal burial section. Artists participating in this November 2026 edition will be invited to conceive new works.

memento vivere is a series produced by Le LABORATOIRE with the support of the City of Grenoble, the City of La Tronche, the Isère Department, UGA, LabEx Architectures, and Cresson.

+2 degrees

Jun 6, 2026 | Laboratoire en

For over a decade, extremely intense fires—megafires—have been breaking out on every continent, burning larger areas each year. Their unpredictable behavior, intensity, and speed of spread make them uncontrollable. A consequence of human activity, they roam throughout all seasons, across territories that fail our imaginations, destroying all life in their path, leaving devastated landscapes and a disoriented population, torn between sadness, guilt, and anger.

Each year brings increasingly pessimistic predictions about our ability to halt this escalation.

Since 2019 Maryvonne Arnaud has been observing the consequences of climate change, notably the mega-forest fires in the Mediterranean, in Greece, on the island of Euboea and in Thrace in the Dadia-Lefkimi-Souffli park, regularly surveying these same territories in order to understand their evolution.

 

Accompanying résurgences Yves Citton (extract)

By exploring certain places on our planet, Maryvonne Arnaud reveals the past in the making—still visible, not yet crushed, not yet compacted and buried. The soils she unearths and photographs are still raw. Insolently present.

By photographing the things she finds between her feet, in traumatized places, Maryvonne Arnaud seems to have chosen a solitary adventure. No human figure in this soil journal. All that remains are frozen traces of suspended presences, fossilized existences. Footprints in the mud, deeply imprinted, which the rain fills with dirty water. Charred animal bones.

What could be more solitary than the turtle shells that mega-fires leave behind by the hundreds? What could be more threatening to our little dreams of individual sovereignty? These turtles carried their homes on their backs, believing they could go anywhere safely. All they had to do was retreat inside their fortress, close the door to any intruder, and believe themselves safe. Hence perhaps the shock felt at the sight of these charred shells littering the ground of the blackened forests of Euboea. What if these gray bones against blackened backgrounds traced on the surface of the soils of our present the traumas of our future tragedies, rather than the traces of our past lives?

These soils, cauterized by mega-fires, however, show something quite different from the desperate prospect of our future collapses. The very notion of collapse would deny the stubborn persistence with which the soils photographed by Maryvonne Arnaud surface: far from sinking into bottomless cave-ins, they resist collapse. They affirm a force that is neither obscure nor subterranean, since it brings to light that which it holds back from falling.

The solitude of these traumatized worlds actually testifies to a tireless proliferation of multitudes. (…)

A step for three

Apr 14, 2026 | local contemporain en

As artists-in-residence at the ZUTTOSOKO Art Center during May 2025, we discovered Litate, a village located between the city of Fukushima and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, a rural Japan of great beauty where numerous rice paddies shape the landscape. The plots are tiny, quite similar to those of oyster farmers on the Atlantic coast, who also open and close sluice gates to maintain the necessary water supply. During our initial conversations with our partners Tao Yoichi and Jun Yano from the ZUTTOSOKO Art Center, the situation appeared precarious, as the challenge for this rural community is to cultivate soils that are now highly radioactive.

As a reminder, the radioactive components released into the atmosphere during the disaster do not all have the same half-lives. Cesium-134 loses half its radioactivity in two years, meaning its radioactivity is now negligible, while cesium-137 loses half its radioactivity in 30 years, meaning its radioactivity is still very high in Litate today. This is why the Japanese government and the power company responsible for the nuclear power plant chose to bulldoze the soil to remove the topsoil, about 5 centimeters deep, and then bury this soil or pack it into enormous sealed bags placed like pieces on a chessboard across the landscape.

To compensate for this removed soil, agricultural land has often been covered with soil taken from the mountain’s undergrowth. However, this cumbersome method has not resulted in fertile soil. The farmers, who relied on highly refined know-how accumulated by generations of rice paddy cultivators, seem discouraged and are no longer farming much. A new phase of engineering now involves supporting farmers by encouraging them to develop soilless agriculture. The rural landscape is thus becoming covered with greenhouses, photovoltaic panels, and, more rarely, crops grown using an infrastructure combining lighting, drip irrigation, and chemical inputs.

These Fukushima landscapes are punctuated by rather discreet Shinto shrines, highlighting a remarkable tree, a spring, or an extraordinary rock with a few standing stones, often very old and engraved with a few words or sometimes a human figure or an animal. These animistic markers add depth to the landscape, reminding us how here, the signs offered by nature have been relentlessly examined and interpreted since ancient times.

The amnesia of the decision-makers who chose to build the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in a tsunami-prone area seems all the more outlandish. The consequences of this negligence are now omnipresent, as the future of this Japanese province rests on its ability to cultivate soils that are now radioactive. The technostructure responsible for the disaster proposes transforming previous agricultural practices through soilless engineering that combines topsoil stripping, artificial substrates, chemical inputs, drip irrigation, and computer technology.

Yet few residents have chosen to return home, and it is only slowly that we realize most of the houses are empty. Nature risks quickly suffocating this now-wasteland. The promises of this devastated land are indeed tentative.

Problem Statement

Most European languages ​​retain the imprint of Latin-derived words within their structures—clues to ancient ways of interpreting the world that have endured because they remain active today. This is true of the word *humus*, denoting the top layer of soil. It shares the same etymological roots as *humanity*, *human*, and *humility*. This implies that soil is not merely our nourishing substrate but also the matrix of humanity—a shared resource without which we could not unfold our lives, socialize, or become truly human.

This Western perspective aligns with Watsuji’s mesology and his concept of *fûdosei* (風土性)—an environmental ethic in which human existence and territory are intimately linked. This territory bears the imprint of human and animal lives, both past and present, while also serving as the matrix for sensibilities shaped by that specific context.

Today, however, the stewardship of the soil and its careful transmission from one generation to the next appear to have been severed, in Japan and elsewhere. Our collective and individual attention has drifted away from the soil. This detachment has gone hand in hand with intensive exploitation and widespread mistreatment of the land, leading to the collapse of the ecosystemic balances essential for the preservation of humanity and the habitability of our planet.

The soil in the village of Litate is heavily contaminated by the radioactive plume carried by the winds from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on March 11, 2011; this radioactivity is imperceptible to human bodies—and likely to animals as well. This invisibility is unsettling. One of the few tangible signs of this health crisis is the large number of residents who have left the area, abandoning their homes to rebuild their lives elsewhere. These empty houses bear witness to lives shattered at a specific moment in the history of human society. They now stand silent, removed from daily life.
That is why we have chosen to focus on these uninhabited houses, turning them into markers that encapsulate the violent experience of 2011, so that it may be passed on to future generations. These spaces—where time seems to stand still, apart from everyday life—will thus become places for reflection and awareness.
It might be a house abandoned by its former residents. Such a house could host a solo artist or a group of artists. It would be used “as is”—preserving the furniture and household objects if they remain, or utilizing the empty spaces.
Alternatively, it could be the vacant site of a house destroyed under the national policy accompanying the evacuation order; this policy provided for the free demolition—up until 2019—of houses where residents no longer wished to resettle. In this case, the artistic approach would involve mapping and staging the abandoned site.

By repeating this process year after year with artists from around the world—each bringing their own cultural perspectives on the land—ZUTTOSOKO aims to create a unique, new kind of heritage: one rooted in the site’s specific history yet universal in its significance.

memento vivere

Jun 18, 2024 | Laboratoire en

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Memento vivere is a prospective research project that blends contemporary creation and social science research. It continues our previous work on the living and vitalities, from a new perspective. For art remains a powerful tool for reframing our lives, situating them in their proper context within the long-term course of humanization and the great cycle of life.

In particular, it can help us recognize how much past generations compose our matrix, how we still lead our lives accompanied by their words and with their tools. This is how they socialize and humanize us. This is a perennial social function, that is, one that is active in the world of the living. No civilization would exist without this transmission of words and knowledge, symbols and tools. There is nothing necrophiliac in this research, but rather, in the era of the Anthropocene and the collapse of ecosystem balances, the desire to question and reframe our lives, to situate them in their proper context within the long-term course of humanization and the tangled dynamics of life

  • Two contemporary works will be open to the public in November 2025 at the Petit Sablon cemetery in the commune of La Tronche : Les Présences by Philippe Mouillon, and La Moire by Mathilde and Nicolas Beguin.
  • Then a series of encounters will take place at the Grenoble museum on Saturday, November 8, 2025, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.:
> Conversations: at the Grenoble Museum

The LABORATOIRE and the Grenoble Museum are offering a series of conversations on Saturday, November 8, about the place of the dead in the world of the living. These conversations will involve authors and artists whose work questions our mortal condition, practitioners who are confronted daily with death or its accompaniment, and the public:

  • Julia Champey, anesthesiologist and intensive care physician, head of the Grenoble branch of the Medical Humanities Chair at the GHU Psychiatry – Neurosciences / Sorbonne, directed by Cynthia Fleury
  • Rachid Koraichi, visual artist, author of Jardin d’Afrique in Zarzis, Tunisia, a cemetery intended to house the anonymous bodies of migrants who died at sea
  • Pierre Reboul, writer, author of Haiku from the Threshold of Death and Petites chroniques d’un carré commun, member of the collective Morts de rue et personnesisolers de Grenoble to accompany the funerals in the Carré commun of the homeless and Disaffiliated
  • Jehanne Roul, lecturer in medieval history at UCO Angers. Her research focuses on beings and their remains—such as relics or the dead on the battlefield.
  • Raphaëlle Guidée, professor of comparative literature at the University of Paris 8, works on mourning, memory, and mass violence, and is the author of The City After. Detroit, a narrative investigation and The Apocalypse, a political imagination
  • Daniel Bougnoux, philosopher, is currently exploring forms of life
  • Pascaline Thiolliere, architect, researcher on spaces of coexistence with the dead and the spatiality of mourning, at the Cresson laboratory, ENSA Grenoble-UGA
  • Jacques Grison, photographer, author of a long-term research project on the landscapes of the Verdun battlefields
  • Arnaud Petit, performer, composer, and conductor, author of operas, oratorios, and works combining music and narrative, including Memories, about the presence of the missing
  • Mathilde Béguin, visual architect, and Nicolas Béguin, cabinetmaker designer, authors of La Moire
  • Philippe Mouillon, visual artist, creator of Memento vivere, and author of Légende(s), composed with Maryvonne Arnaud in Sarajevo besieged

The Grenoble Museum thus revives a long tradition of art history, to which its collections bear witness, from Egyptian antiquities to the present day.

With the support of the Ministry of Culture (Drac Auvergne Rhône-Alpes), the Auvergne Rhône-Alpes region – within the framework of the 21st Century Memories calls for projects, the Department of Isère, the City of La Tronche and the city and Museum of Grenoble.

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Reclaim public space now !

May 5, 2022 | local contemporain en, RECHERCHE / PUBLICATIONS

While the Ukrainian resistance overthrows in kyiv the statue dedicated to the friendship between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, Romanian artists and intellectuals are wondering how to radically renew the artistic presence in the public space of Bucharest.

 

Here as elsewhere, the steamroller of the market imaginary dominates the public space, but the city is a complex palimpsest composed by Byzantine then Orthodox imaginaries, Austro-Hungarian then Soviet occupations, the frequency of earthquakes, the state of abandonment of buildings whose owners disappeared during the disasters of the 20th century, and today by the unbridled Eldorado of the globalized economy.

 

In this context, what legitimacy to rely on? How to take in charge without waiting? How to regenerate public space by opening it up to cross-cutting initiatives? How to share the differences of interpretation of the world? How to contribute to the autonomy of individuals? How to revive? How to welcome dissident thoughts, poetics, social innovations?

 

The initiative led by Edmond Niculusca (ARCEN) and supported by the French Institute of Bucharest brings together artists Pisica Patrata, Dan Perjovschi, Cristian Neagoe, architect-urban planner Monica Sebestyen and former Minister of Culture Corina Suteu, expert international in innovative cultural policies.