European Economic
and Social Committee
Marie Ouazzani & Nicolas Carrier
Marie Ouazzani - Born in 1991.
Nicolas Carrier - Born in 1981.
Live and work in Paris.
Having graduated respectively from the Villa Arson National Higher School of Art, Nice, and the Paris Cergy National Graduate School of Art and UFR Cinema, Sorbonne Nouvelle, Marie Ouazzani and Nicolas Carrier started working together in 2015. They explore changing urban territories, outskirts and symbolic spaces of globalisation. From the history of these landscapes, the duo invents climate fictions, situated in an indeterminate present where past and future are mixed. The vestiges of globalisation stand alongside the ecological crisis and its impact on human bodies, plants and architecture. Vegetation, omnipresent in their work, reveals the tensions of these environments and offers a passive resistance to climate change. These videos, images, infusions and installations oscillate between weariness and hope. They mix erudition and invention to rethink the relations between the different elements of our ecosystem and our way of inhabiting the planet.
Video transcription
It’s a video series set around European ports, and a tropical plant that can be found there and this plant allows us to talk about the history of Europe and all of the links that it has forged across the world, whether it’s through globalisation, industrialisation or colonisation.
In fact, there is the idea of seeing how we could put hypotheses on their adaptation and acclimatisation in the context of the climate crisis.
Extra tropical, 2020-2022
4 HD videos, 6'. Production: CAC Passerelle; La Junqueira; Institut Français
Extra tropical is a set of four short videos, filmed in the European ports of Brest, Lisbon, Antwerp and Genoa. This project combines the point of view of four different tropical plants on these port areas. Starting from their properties and migratory journey, it retraces a history of Europe, from colonial exploitation to the absurdities of globalisation, and envisages, thanks to their acclimatisation, hypotheses of resistance to the climate crisis. This poetic work also brings to bear the coloniality of botany in a way that asks: can the Platationocene be intersected by the Planthropocene?
Two of the videos can be seen here :
Extra tropical (arecaceae), 2020, HD video, 6', production CAC Passerelle © Marie Ouazzani & Nicolas Carrier
