21. Polémoflore

The French term “polémoflore” (obsidional plants) refers to the typical and spontaneous plant life that grows after a war or military occupation. This plant life is linked to the disturbances created in soils and habitats which can be seen in the very fabric of the landscape, and reveals the upheavals and consequences of human activity.

From a wooden viewpoint surrounded by braided ropes, the visitor looks down upon a deep crack now filled with luxuriant life in the form of a garden that is a source of life. Trees and shrubs all provide shade and other benefits, ruderal plants flourish, yuccas and countless perennials grow side-by-side... Seated on reused materials assembled using the drystone technique, visitors can reflect on this rebirth of nature in the heart of a former trench.

Polémoflore is a garden that illustrates the notion of repair and that life goes on.

Baptiste Miremont was born in 1986 and lives in Bagnolet. Before becoming a landscaper, he was a writer for the television and media, and a market gardener and horticulturist in California. He has two Master’s degrees in modern history (Paris IV - Sorbonne) and landscape theory and scientific ecology (Agroparistech - École Nationale Supérieure du Paysage Versailles), and he approaches his gardens much like a narrative whereby the shapes, materials and the living interact with one another. Baptiste Miremont is a project manager at Atelier Coloco, a Parisian landscaping company that works in partnership with Gilles Clément and Camille Muller. He enjoys taking on the challenges that have to be faced in the urban environment and this is where the majority of his projects take place. Thanks to his expertise in the technical, regulatory and political requirements of  urban areas, he takes on this balancing act of developing projects in which he hopes that abundant plant life will help the world return to a more natural state in a distant yet necessary future. He is passionate about botany and strives to combine plant species that are visually pleasing, local and take into account the issue of climate change. As well as his work at Atelier Coloco, Baptiste Miremont also creates gardens for private individuals and festivals. He often works with Orlando Clarke and they collaborate on far-reaching proposals that combine gardening practices, environmental remediation and traditional construction techniques.

Orlando Clarke is an artist who was born in 1990 and lives in Marseille. He was attracted to art and materials even as a young child, and decided to study glass-blowing techniques, graduating with his BMA diploma in 2008. He left his studies in art history and archaeology in 2013 to devote his time to casting statuary art and obtained a professional qualification at Atelier 960 in the French department of Var. This was the beginning of his technical career and he went on to work on projects that were extremely varied, including facsimiles of historic bronze statues, gilded using the process of electroplating, dinosaur fossils from the Cretaceous period, and cathedral bells. He has also created moulds for the factories in Couleuvre and Carron, took part in casting the Monument in tribute to the black army, and worked on the moulding and design for the New Worlds project at Mana Art Centre in French Guiana for several months. Alongside these projects, he also works with dry stone, a construction technique that does not use mortar or a binder, and has been training people from all sorts of backgrounds in this profession since 2012. He is involved in several large-scale projects, including the restoration work for the terraces of Montmajour abbey, commissioned by the French National Monuments Centre. Thanks to this cross-disciplinary approach to his work, he is able to combine technical expertise with his passion for literature in his artistic approach. He is very much influenced by construction and spatial planning and uses formal language and discursive arguments to describe architecture in his series Études monuments, in which he makes a mockery of his subject using different scales, materials and combines absurd proverbs with poor quality graphics. At the same time, he has been working in partnership with Baptiste Miremont for a long time now on installations that are situated somewhere between environmental remediation, engineering and landscaping.