In the mountainous region of Drôme, France, a winding road snakes between peaks where slopes radiate with the golden yellow of juniper trees. Vultures dance in spirals overhead while the buzzing of insects challenges the summer's torpor, leading to a valley and its village where an innovative agricultural experiment has been quietly transforming the relationship between humans and nature.
For approximately ten years, a collective of farmers has been experimenting with agricultural practices that honor the memory of streams and the howling of wolves. Their approach recognizes that each territory possesses its own psyche, its genius loci—a sum of all the elements and presences that compose it. Conscious of the principles of symbiosis and mutual aid that govern ecosystems, the collective draws inspiration from these plural solidarities to imagine new relationships between the domestic and the wild, between technology and the organic.
Faced with the dizzying prospect of coming chaos, their experience is both complex and inventive. It leads to a rethinking of the narratives that have shaped the world-dwelling of modern societies. There is something fascinating about observing how a practice as ancient as agriculture can summon enchantment. By weaving intimate connections with the non-domesticated beings with fur, feathers, and leaves, human gestures and thoughts become hybridized.
This transformation materializes as an invitation to offer our bodies and our imaginations to these enigmatic beings—these other living creatures who carry their own perception of reality. With awareness of these multiple realities, our interior landscapes can then be reshaped. The practice challenges conventional boundaries between human cultivation and wild nature, suggesting new forms of coexistence.
Photographer Eve Campestrini has been regularly staying in this village for the past three years, documenting this unique intersection of agriculture and wilderness. Each visit, the place envelops her and invites her to touch that zone of contact between self and the inhabited outside world. In encounters with shadows and the less visible, her series 'Lueurs Fauves' seeks the experience of the sensible.
Using various photographic tools and camera traps, Campestrini quests for the carnal traces of these connections. The alternation of aesthetics—figurative and abstract images—proposes the idea of relationship between these existences and questions our physical and psychic connection with a territory. Her work captures moments that exist at the boundary between the seen and unseen, the domestic and the wild.
Gradually, the narrative installs a tension between apparent and hidden dimensions. The vision is not completely exact; the times are suspended, crepuscular. The image stares back and plays with its power of evocation to propose new rites and perceptions of daily life. Sometimes, the moment wavers and lets a little wonder escape, revealing the magic that exists in the intersection of human agriculture and untamed nature.
Arthur Dayras has documented Campestrini's work, which can be followed on Instagram, showcasing how contemporary art can illuminate the evolving relationship between human cultivation and the wild world that surrounds and interpenetrates it.
