The annual Artistic Creation Chair is dedicated to all forms of artistic creation. For one academic year, it hosts a leading figure in contemporary artistic creation.

Landscapes, gardens and natural engineering

My professional practice consists of a global activity involving the design and realization of landscapes and gardens, the writing and publication of texts related to this activity and the reasoned communication of this practice. This last point gives rise to conferences and exhibitions, but also, and above all, to the teaching of "landscape projects" at the École nationale supérieure du paysage de Versailles.

At the Collège de France, in the course of the hours allotted to me, I intend to offer a synthesis of this teaching by referring to experience - i.e. the field - through a selection of images directly related to the theme addressed. These are illustrated lessons.

The first three sessions are devoted to the three main concepts resulting from my research and associated projects: the Moving Garden, the Planetary Garden and the Third Landscape. This approach gives pre-eminence to the living and presents the landscape in its biological dimension.

Subsequent courses place this dimension in confrontation with art, architecture, science and the spoken word, revealing the interweaving of nature and artifice in the emergence of landscape and garden.

Finally, this ensemble is in turn challenged by the economic context and by the positioning of human societies in relation to nature. The seemingly contradictory combination of the materiality of the market and the immateriality of beliefs gives rise, wherever we are on the planet, to the construction of a landscape.

The emphasis on the living corresponds to a bias dictated by the demands of ecology. Others give an advantage to architecture, design, ornament or the object: all of which appear in my own practice in a minor mode.

With a view to balancing existing energies and, above all, anticipating future living conditions, gardens and landscapes are imagined, created, maintained and taught in the light of what I call "natural genius".