WORKSHOP VEXLARD – MATTER-EARTH. QUALITY, USES, PROJECTS

Gilles Vexlard. Matter-earth. Quality, uses, projects
Design workshop. Milan, 14-18th September 2011
To accumulate, take away, divide, compose and modify: earth is the matter par excellence that suits the human primary uses of the ground. At the beginnings when man started modifying the environment, earth’s countless adaptable possibilities and the various characteristics of the physical components allowed for the realisation of artefacts, adjustment for productive purposes of entire territories, the birth and fortune of important civilisations. Earth is also a true and proper living organism composed of an infinite number of communities invisible upon a first glance, but which represents the true richness of the areas, the measure of biodiversity.
Each square metre occupied by agriculture is a result of the manual work of generations of individuals, stratified in time, who have made the earth fertile and productive, wrenching it away from water with reclamations and from impervious slopes through terraces, modelling it according to necessity and equipping it with extraordinary purpose built irrigation and drainage networks.
How does one recognise the real quality of the earth? How does one plan with earth in contemporary terms? How does one use a limited resource such as earth, in a respectful, ethical and balanced manner, wrenching it away from the rampant urban consumption and intensive agricultural exploitation dominated by the global and now unnatural logic?
The workshop is organized in collaboration with Ecole Nationale Supérieure du Paysage de Versailles.