To a thousand sources, the good life" / " Aux mille source la belle vie"

This project explores the interaction between childhood, nature and ecological awareness. It looks at the child's relationship with the living world, seen as a state of porosity where sensations and perceptions pass through the body.

Faced with our growing distance from nature and our impoverished nature and our diminishing sensitivity to it, a number of city dwellers are taking the plunge and moving to the countryside. We're one of them, we're leaving the Paris region to go green, to go to countryside to offer our children the chance to be in permanent contact with nature, and to establish a new relationship with the world and the living world. We're heading for the Millevache plateau in the Limousin Mountain in Creuse, a "hyper-rural" département par excellence, but one where net migration in recent years, perhaps due to its social, cultural, militant and political roots. The population seems to have a vision, collective initiatives and projects, reinventing ways of living together and new ways of looking at the landscape, new ways of living in the countryside.

A territory where we can offer our childrenthe opportunity to be in constant contact with nature, to establish a different relationship with the living world.

I question this time of childhood, sometimes considered as Arcadia - a lost paradise, a bygone era - in its original relationship with the living world. I photograph the child’s state of porosity to the world, where the interrelations between the subject, matter and living things are primary and pass through the body - the senses. Children are dreamers and explorers, and have an intense, imaginative relationship with the world.

The images evoke sensations, allowing us to (re)feel the softness of plants, the sun that warms the skin in summer, the body immersed in the water of a lake...

Bodies and plants are apprehended in their sculptural dimension, playing with and invading the frame. People, without distinction, human and more than human, live together and respond to each other. The close-up - sometimes almost abstract - views of plant matter are perceived as plant power. These pieces of nature act as synecdochs and material for dreaming.

In the face of our growing distance from nature and our impoverished sensitivity to it, this project questions our relationship with the world, inviting us to a possible reconciliation, a sense of wonder, a re-enchantment; it envisages ways of moving towards a sensitivity that adults seem to have lost.

This project is supported by the CNAP - 2022 for cotemporary documentary photography.