Chromoculture: Nurturing Colors through Art and Design
Chromoculture is an eco-pedagogy and research-creation project that aims to promote and enhance sustainable coloring practices in art and design through the creation of a laboratory-garden specialized in natural colorants and plants for creative practices at the textile, ceramic, printmaking, and photographic studios of the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art et de Design de Limoges in order to question the capacity of art and design to initiate ecological change in the color industries.
Regional
France
Région Nouvelle-Aquitaine
Mainly rural
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): Ecole nationale supérieure d'art et de design de Limoges Type of organisation: Public authority (European/national/regional/local) First name of representative: Arnaud Last name of representative: Dubois Gender: Male Nationality: France Function: Professor Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: 19 avenue Martin Luther King Town: Limoges Postal code: 87000 Country: France Direct Tel:+33 6 87 88 97 03 E-mail:arnaud.dubois@ensa-limoges.fr Website:https://www.ensa-limoges.fr/arnaud-dubois/
Chromoculture is an eco-pedagogical and research-creation project that aims to promote and enhance sustainable coloring practices in art and design through the creation of a laboratory-garden specialized in natural colorants and plants for creative practices at the textile, ceramic, printmaking, and photographic studios of the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art et de Design de Limoges. Chromoculture emerged from a historical reflection regarding the cultural and natural environment of ENSAD Limoges, which is marked since the creation of the school in 1881 both by rurality (the Limousin province) and polluting and energy-consuming color practices of the synthetic dyes (the Aubusson tapestry manufactures) and glazes (Limoges porcelain industry). The project was launched in October 2021 in collaboration with the botanist-artist Liliana Motta (Laboratoire du Dehors) and thirty B.A. and M.A. students from the Art and Design departments. By combining a methodology based on light and simplified cultivation techniques with wild plants from a local partner’s farm, landscape design, eco-pedagogy, and research-creation, our project endeavors to rethink new relationships between gardening, art, design, and color for the twenty-first century and on a regional scale (Nouvelle-Aquitaine region), in order to develop innovative interactions between horticulture and creative practices and to question the capacity of art and design to initiate ecological change in the color industry. To achieve this goal, Chromoculture promotes the reform of the “color curriculum” in art schools towards a more eco-pedagogical approach. A color pedagogy that takes into consideration botany as a fertile source of inspiration for color practices in contemporary art and design, as well as a call to reshape a relationship between color and nature beyond the modern nature/culture dualism.
Color
Ecopedagogy
Gardening
Studio practices
Sustainability
The industrial technologies of colorization, the maters used to colorize objects, and the color sciences associated with these techniques, have radically changed the relationship to color in Modernity, and were a core aspect of the “color revolution” that happened in European arts in the first half of the 20th century. For the 21st century, Chromoculture wants to create new relationships between artists, scientists, industrialists and society to be able to produce new sustainable chromatic materials that could nourish the aesthetics of nature and carbon free color innovations. If the global project of an aesthetic education of humans, as it emerged in Europe with Schiller, found in the color debates a field of application for a modern politics of beauty, Chromoculture follows this path but questions the problems of color in the Anthropocene. Our objective is to go beyond the Modernist project to discover the universal laws from which a rational theory of beauty could be formulated in the context of the color chaos leads by the proliferation and accumulation of the western industrial age. As such, Chromoculture wants to keep the capacity of color to initiate aesthetic changes but wants to renew it as an ecological tool in the context of climate change and pollution crise. If the Bauhaus’ teachers made color a fundamental aspect of art schools’ curriculum and a way to educate artists, designers, and architects to the industrial aesthetics, Chromoculture defines coloration as a an educational, technological, sociological, environmental, and cultural roadmap to accelerate an integrated carbon neutral transition in Europe. In re-connecting color pedagogy with agro-ecology and not with the chemical industries, we propose to assist, protect and coexist with plants and, in doing so, to change our attitude towards color materiality.
Since Bauhaus shaped western post-war color aesthetics, Chromoculture key objective is to pursue the development of a new color aesthetic that feat the objectives of the European Green Deal. Indeed, if we consider the Bauhaus color aesthetic as the aesthetic of the industrial area, that promote in that sense the polluting and energy-consuming color practices of the synthetic color industries, Chromoculture objective is to promote and enhance sustainable coloring practices in art and design that enhance a color aesthetic of nature. From the colors of enamel in use in Limoges since the 12th century, to those of glaze from the porcelain industry since the 18th century, to the colors of dyes of the Aubusson-Felletin tapestries since the 16th century, colors in the Limousin province are historically inscribed in the longue-durée of the material, social, and territorial history of pre-industrialized color techniques and aesthetics. This peculiar context helps Chromoculture to achieve its objective of a “green” transformation of color. In combining contemporary creation with partnerships with heritage color crafts (Aubusson tapestry is an Unesco ICH, Limoges’s enamellers on metals skills are a French ICH, and Limoges is a Unesco Creative Cities for Crafts), Chromoculture tries to develop an exemplary, hybrid, interdisciplinary, experimental, and holistic approach to the arts and crafts of colors in 21th Century that promote new color aesthetics of nature. Based on sustainable color production processes, remediation of natural ecosystems, and practice-based research, Chromoculture experienced, for the people, a new colored ecosystems applied to human habitation and material culture beyond the status quo of modern color system.
The project is co-constructed with a large local socio-economic network of more than 20 structures (research laboratory, university, private companies, non-profit organizations, museum, art center and local authority). This first major asset of the project is driven by a will to create an inclusive based project at all the stages of implementations of Chromoculture. For example, to grow the garden, we initiated a collaboration with non-profit organizations that was very positive in terms of inclusion because we developed a co-working process between students and people with disabilities. Our network also promotes the possibility of our students to live permanently in Nouvelle-Aquitaine and to become citizens committed to an eco-responsible approach of contemporary creation. In that sense, the highly targeted cooperation with local knowledge and know-how in a dialogue between agroecology, art, crafts, and design is a decisive element of inclusion as it will participate to the economical development of the region and its attractiveness. Finally, the strong involvement of the students at each stage of the project, coupled with the supervision and personalized follow-up that they have thanks to the limited number of students involved in the project (on average about thirty students), participate to develop their autonomy and making them competitive in an emerging field of expertise. The project governance also reflects our inclusive point of view. The ENSA Research, Pedagogy and Student Life Commission is consulted three time a year to adapt the school teaching to the training objectives of Chromoculture. The school's scientific committee is also involved in the project to maintain a coherence between the project and the school's guidelines for sustainable development. A steering committee has also been set up among the partners of Chromoculture to assure the sustainability and inclusivity of the project at a regional scale.
The innovative perspective of Chromoculture as an eco-pedagogical project, combined with the active participation of our partners − who are all engaged in pioneering activities in the field of social, societal, and environmental cultural responsibility with color − would allow ENSAD Limoges to become a public innovation center, in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, for the ecological transition of color, the links between agroecology and artistic practices, and the pedagogy of eco-creation. The innovative space we are opening with this project: a color laboratory-garden directly accessible to our students and our partners for experimentation and research-creation; the restructuring of the school studios to develop eco-responsible color practices; the collaboration between the different studios (printmaking, photography, textiles, ceramics) to promote transversality and a holistic vision of eco-pedagogy, opens the school to civil society in an unexpected level. The strong partnership with research laboratory and university as much as private companies, non-profit organization, public museum, art center or local authority, in each stage of the project, provides a strong relationship between the school and the society but also the students with the citizens as we experienced during the 2022 European Heritage Days. Chromoculture those become a new learning space to impulse a regional and collective dynamic about ecological and aesthetic transitions applied to the "culture of color" understood equally in an agricultural and artistic meaning. The laboratory-garden: its trees and plants, the water that irrigates it or even the other living entities that inhabit it (insects, mushrooms, small mammals, birds, etc.), becomes a place of intervention where all the innovative public activities of the project help to reconnect the citizens with art and nature through color.
At the beginning of January 2022, the Council of the European Union affirmed the need to integrate the ecological transition into all educational programs. As such, color becomes a key element in the decarbonization of artistic practices the European art schools must actively engage with. Indeed, the color industries provides, since the second half of 19th Century, the toxic materials artists and designers use in their daily practices and is also responsible for some parts of the pollution of water and soil. It is indeed estimated that the textile industry, for example, and in particular dyeing activities, is responsible for 20% of water pollution in the world. In this context, and because we believe that action is an essential step in the effective transmission of new knowledge and skills in terms of ecological transition, ENSA Limoges has committed, in October 2021 and thanks to a first two-year national funding of the French Ministry of Culture (2021-2023), the co-creation, by the students, of a large laboratory-garden in the school’s park (1500m2 of cultivable area ) in collaboration with the Argentine artist-botanist Liliana Motta, local farmers, regional horticultural research center (CRITT), local non-profit organization (APSAH) and the Botanical Garden and Museum of Fine Arts of the City of Limoges. This first year of the program was devoted to the collaborative design of the garden, its layout and its mulching using simplified cultivation techniques. In the fall of 2022, the students planted around 300 trees and shrubs with horticultural workers and thanks to our collaborations with the farm of Atelier Betty de Paris which cultivates Indigo in Limousin in an eco-responsible way. This year, students will start working on the ecological irrigation of the garden (in partnership with an engineering school) with the project of a large rainwater recovery basin and the installation of autonomous watering pottery (in relation with a private company).
The Chromoculture interdisciplinary team considers color not as a perception or a language but as a material. As such, we conceptualized for the project a "chromatic ecology" where colors are part of a network of complex interactions and reciprocities between beings, things, and the environment, where domesticated and savage uses of nature are intertwined, and are shape within multiple interrelations between science, art, and technique. Following the anthropology general program on the technical act, the relationship between technique and aesthetics, and the bio-psycho-social conception of the body, we developed an ethnobiology perspective to question the forms of interrelations that are established between constructed and natural color ecosystems, between natural color, technology of coloration, and individual and social experiences of color aesthetic in a desire to go beyond modern dualisms (nature/culture, subject/object, practice/concept, art/environment, living/artifact) for a more dynamic, sustainable, and color-evolving design. In combining aesthetics, anthropology, and research-creation we want to activate, from the figure of the garden and the activity of gardening, new forms of agora where points of view on and from agriculture question the critical situations we are going through. Chromoculture then questions the ethics and aesthetics of cultivated plants to propose an extension of the domain of color aesthetics which, against the philosophy of art, refuses to ontologically separate human productions from those of the living. On the contrary we deploy an environmental ethic of creation by articulating ways of doing colors (agricultural, artistic, and scientific practices) and ways of making people feel colors (devices). Largely interdisciplinary, Chromoculture opens new space between creation, scientific research, and horticultural practices as a real gesture of political ecology.
While the new figures of the farmer-designer and the artist-gardener are emerging, it is still uncommon in art schools to set up major programs of eco-pedagogy to promote a new environmental ethic of creation. If, on a European scale, we can mention the students’ initiative of the Garden Department at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, the private Inland Academy project by artist Fernando Garcia-Dory in Madrid or even certain project of the TRANS master's program of the HEAD in Geneva as projects that share common interests with Chromoculture, we notice that these kinds of projects are still marginal in the curricula of French art schools. Although the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs de Paris was the first to adopt an ecological transition plan in 2019, its geographical situation does not allow the school to fully deploy an eco-pedagogical program that deals with agroecology in relation with studios practices. The rurality of the Limousin territory, which for a long time made ENSAD Limoges an eccentric school far from the national and European art center, has thus become an opportunity, and a strength. If in modernity the narrative of urbanity, as a space of progress and as a cultural and artistic horizon, prevented artists to project themselves and their activities outside the cities, today, on the contrary, it is in the rural that a new physical and cultural space emerges for critical contemporary art and design. The rural thus becomes a place for new imaginations, where artists can become “guardians of the living” and territorial actors. It is precisely the eccentricity and rurality of ENSAD Limoges that allows us to actively train our students to the knowledge, know-how and interpersonal skills needed to the integration of ecological issues in artistic creation. Chromoculture thus positively initiates artists and designers to consider alternatives to the social situation in which we find ourselves and which has little historical equivalent.
The garden's plant collection will be organized around a collaborative, public, open access, and co-constructed herbarium between the students and the partners: "The Flora" of ENSAD Limoges. This herbarium would serve to our partners, other educational institutions, and citizens, as an object to support, develop, create, and transfer, on an ecological, social, artistic, and economic levels, the possibilities of sustainable bio-regionalist coloring practices. The herbarium as data base opens the possibility to replicate the determinants of agroecological and social innovation on others regional places. By promoting an undergraduate and graduate program in line with the needs of rural areas, Chromoculture also supports the understanding of the dynamics and entrepreneurial initiatives needed to future artists and designers in the rural. It is also a question of including the Chromoculture point of view inside the art schools that promote ecological and social transition. The Chromoculture project, based on the creation of a garden of colored plants in the school park, is perfectly replicable in schools which pursue sustainable development approach: the plants specimens and associated data used for color practices are documented and can be used to develop in other places, groups of beneficiaries, contexts but always with local partners, vegetable dyeing in textile studio, but also to work on enamels for ceramics and the production of materials in printmaking (paper and inks).
Chromoculture eco-pedagogy methodology first enhances teachers to pass from an expert posture to that of a facilitator of the project. This makes it possible to overcome a possible feeling of illegitimacy of our students while encouraging them to be more reflexive and autonomous. Training within the Chromoculture project would thus be oriented towards interdisciplinary projects (arts, human and social sciences, natural sciences and players in the socio-economic world), participatory courses (workshops in the professional world, co-organization of study days, training in agroecology in the garden) and case studies (study trip, company visit, conferences). This less top-down approach would encourage student success by encouraging them to go beyond the observation of socio-ecological issues and to imagine, at the regional level, courses of action and possible and lasting solutions and to integrate into a regional professional network. To embody this eco-pedagogy through practice, the continuation and amplification of the restructuring of the school's workshops is then necessary. This investment would indeed make viable the experimentation of new ways of making color, between the garden, the school studios, and the project partners. To this, we would finally add the establishment of the conditions for publicizing the work of the students carried out within the Chromoculture project (exhibition, publication, communication) as an opportunity to make the culture of color visible through art and design.
Polluted soils and waters are one of the “negative commons” generated since the chemical color revolution of the second half of the 19th century. Today, it is estimated that about 60,000 tons of dyes are discharged worldwide into the environment each year, from a huge number of creative industries like textile, leathers, ink, or paint, and causes over 20% of global water pollution. These dyes pollutants are also responsible of heavy metal pollution in the soil environment likewise the mining activities which have led to contamination in agricultural soils. Chromoculture directly addresses these negative commons but on a local scale. Indeed, the geodiversity of Limousin combined with the dyes activities surroundings the tapestry manufactured in Aubusson or the Limoges heritage arts of fire (enamels and porcelain) has led, since the 1950’s, to the development of many polluting activities linked with the exploitation of the soil or the wastewater of dyes. As such, Chromoculture first valorizes the color biomass resulting from phytoremediation processes on former Limousin’s mining sites through the Limoges heritage crafts of glazes and enamels. Today the mining activities are stopped but the soil pollution remains. In collaboration with the local company Cristalerie de Saint-Paul – the only French manufacturer of enamels – we experiment if the structural properties of vitrification could make possible to neutralize the toxic elements absorbed by the plants and as such, to valorize the charged biomass with metallic elements into a territorialized resource, able to initiate a resilient reconversion of enamels production. With local farmers, professionals from the Aubusson-Felletin wool network, and a local company of natural plant-based dyes, we research renewable and traceable raw materials using non polluting manufacturing techniques, to develop original and high-quality ecological coloring products for textile uses.
To date, the greatest success of the project has been the capacity of Chromoculture to make different and many people, inside and outside the school, work together around a garden conceived as a new educational space, in connection with the ecological and cultural transition the western societies face. Without this massive and diversified support, we would not have been able first, to find the funds to launch the project, then to bring out, in only one year, a garden of this magnitude and finally, from this experimental project, to get on board many local socio-economic and cultural actors, ready to engage in the sustainability of Chromoculture and the nurturing of color through art and design for the 21st century. Based on these results, we now must be careful about the care we are going to give to the garden to let the school becomes a space of free cohabitation with the living beings we just brought to life. In this respect, we are planning for 2023-2024 a whole series of scientific activities (study day, conference, publication, film cycle) and artistic ones (invitations of artists and designers engaged in the botanical revolution, outside workshops with our local partners, exhibition) which will support the simultaneous growth of the garden and the students for whom we are now equally responsible. In this context, we plan to actively support the symmetrical development of bio and cultural diversity in the school. We want to amplify the articulation between the garden’s inhabitants and those of the school’s studios (the students, faculty and staff), to make Chromoculture an educational space that structurally changes the relationship artists, designers, the art world and its public have with color, nature, living environments and non-human living beings.
The development of new competences in eco-design and eco-creation in relation with the local context is at the heart of the expected results of the Chromoculture project. Our network of local socio-economic partners engaged in transition (more than 20 structures established in the region) is a first major asset to achieve this goal because it will help the students to become artists and designers committed to the sustainability of their practices. In addition, highly targeted cooperation with the local workers that developed sustainable color materials is a way for them to acquire new skills and understand the socio-economic challenges of eco-design and eco-creation. Also, the diversity and complementarity of the knowledge they will learn with Chromoculture, in a constant back and forth between the school and the land, will allow them to build up a new professional network essential to their future rural integration and as a mean to continue their activity after graduation. Finally, the strong involvement of the students at each stage of the project, coupled with the supervision and personalized follow-up that they will have thanks to the limited number of students involved in the project (on average about thirty students each year) will participate to develop their autonomy and making them artists with strong and helpful competences in an emerging field of expertise.
