This interview presents a conversation with Chloé Mazzani, Bulat Sharipov, and Charlie Fox of the collective MITR (Made in the River), conducted by Patrick Degeorges. MITR is a collective of artists and researchers working at the intersection of art, ecology, and community engagement. Their practices focus on rivers and urban waterways, creating experiences that go beyond conventional artistic production to generate relational, ecological, and transformative effects.
The discussion explores how MITR develops projects that are not aimed at producing traditional art objects but at fostering encounters, shaping perceptions, and encouraging new forms of engagement with local environments and communities. Specific initiatives, such as the Alchemical Museum, collaborative river clean-up projects, and residencies with local organisations like Hôtel du Nord and the Bureau des Guides GR2013, illustrate the collective’s approach to blending artistic, scientific, and social practices.
Throughout the interview, the collective reflects on their methodology, the challenges of working within institutional and economic frameworks, and the potential of art to contribute to environmental awareness, community participation, and the creation of new sensibilities toward place and territory. They also address practical aspects of sustaining long-term projects, transferring protocols across sites, and balancing creative experimentation with ecological and social realities.
This conversation offers a detailed view of how contemporary artistic practices can generate meaningful change over time, connecting human and non-human actors, and exploring the relational and transformative potential of art in complex ecological and social contexts.
Patrick Degeorges
Could you each introduce yourselves and explain how your collective came into being?
Chloé Mazzani
I have been living in Marseille for about ten years, and my artistic work is deeply rooted in this territory, which is why location is so important to me. Over time, however, my practice has expanded beyond the city itself, thanks to encounters with people and local initiatives, often connected to walking, urban exploration, and moving through the wider metropolitan area.
I originally come from theatre, clowning, puppetry and performance. For several years now, I have moved away from the idea of the stage and the theatre building towards working outdoors, in the city itself. I became increasingly interested in urbanisation, in the stories of human beings and in the landscapes people inhabit every day. This led me to develop forms of storytelling that are directly connected to territories.
Narration and the act of giving voice to places are at the core of my work, and they can take many forms. Although I am not trained as a visual artist, I began experimenting with materials of the Aygalades River, an urban river in Marseille. The project Made In The River has emerged from this trajectory.
Charlie Fox
I live between London and Marseille, and my work has always been connected to art, activism and ecology. I did not fully realise this at first, but when I was sixteen I made my first project about waste: I collected rubbish from a local river and transformed it into something else. That was already a form of ecological art.
My practice is strongly influenced by Joseph Beuys and his idea of social art¹: the idea that art belongs to everyone, that everyone has creative potential, and that creativity can be a social and communal force. When I arrived in Marseille, my French was quite limited, so I found myself communicating in a way similar to how one might relate to other species or non-human forms. The river became central to my work because I felt compelled to work with it.
What fascinated me was how the river transforms materials, sometimes in very specific ways, sometimes in more generic ones. What really interests me is the collective dimension of this work: the collaboration between humans and non-humans. The question of whether interspecies communication is possible is a very big one, but it is also a meaningful one, especially because everything is constantly being transformed.
We no longer live in a “natural” environment; we live in a post-natural one. The Aygalades River makes this very visible. Through the project, we discovered microplastics and all kinds of micropollutants. I remember reading Rachel Carson when I was young, which is why I did my first river project². Today, these invisible pollutants are everywhere. They are subtle but deeply transformative, and we are trying to explore their effects through creative practice.
Bulat Sharipov
I am based in Marseille. I come from documentary cinema, but my work has evolved towards audiovisual installations. In our collective projects, I am responsible for visuals and sound, and I also work with performance formats.
Patrick Degeorges
Thank you! In your presentations, artistic engagement appears inseparable from ecological concern and from the habitability of environments. My first question is: why do you seek to build an alliance between art and territorial issues? Why do you feel this is necessary, and how can your practice respond to that need?
Charlie Fox
On a personal level, Joseph Beuys’ ideas about social art deeply shaped me, especially his critique of the instrumentalisation of art³. It is always important to ask why and how art is being used. But going further back, before modern art, artistic practices were about sharing, about collectively building a vision of the world. For me, this means trying to overcome barriers and to create a collective imagination that differs from the one promoted by consumer culture.
Take waste as an example. I read that each person produces around one tonne of waste — or at least an enormous amount — and that is frightening. Human-made materials now dominate the planet. The issue is not just climate change; it is what all of this says about our relationship to the world. These numbers are so overwhelming that people cannot really grasp them. When everything feels so catastrophic, it becomes difficult to imagine positive, open, visionary or even spiritual narratives that remind us that this shared planet is worth caring for.
Without those narratives, people simply continue to consume and throw things away. Everything we make is designed to become waste. In rivers, you find phones, computers, plastics, and materials that look like minerals but are actually synthetic. In some places, there is more plastic than natural matter.
In 2013, during Marseille’s year as European Capital of Culture, I worked with London-based artists on ecology and community projects. We took people across the city, helping them see their environment differently and understand what sustainability might mean, and what they can do as individuals. Otherwise, people feel powerless.
With Chloé, we developed a protocol for collecting waste and creating what we call an Alchemical Museum. The project is called The River Is an Alchemist. We worked with people who regularly clean the Aygalades River, but even after clean-ups, the river fills up again after every heavy rain. Our goal is to change the narrative: to tell stories, to involve people emotionally, and to make them care for the territory they live in. The simplest way to do this is to take people to the river, to let them experience it, and to show them the life that exists there alongside the pollution.
Chloé Mazzani
For me, this alliance between art and ecology is almost self-evident. I believe that this is what artistic practice should be about today: placing itself at the service of the habitability of our environments. As an artist, I feel a strong sense of responsibility and engagement in this direction, and I am willing to dedicate time and energy to it.
I enjoy artworks that explore personal or inner sensibilities, but what truly matters to me is to create artistic practices that serve collective life. I was trained in a very classical relationship to art, where the artwork is an object, a product. But over time, that model became less and less desirable to me. As Charlie mentioned, the issue of waste and accumulation is crucial: producing yet another object feels problematic in an ecological context.
Not producing an object shifts the focus towards relationships: between people, between humans and non-humans, and between territories. These relational dynamics are what truly move me. Connection activates us; it creates agency. This alliance is about making tools. Art is a tool, just like science: it is a way of understanding and translating reality, which can then be put at the service of a place — here, the river.
We use art to feel, to understand, and then to share those experiences, so that new forms of relating to a place and to one another can emerge. These forms can have a real impact on quality of life. It is not about producing isolated “art moments”, but about creating something more diffuse and gentle, allowing different perspectives — scientific, political, social — to intersect.
Bulat Sharipov
I have always been trying to work with a territory, first, because I find it interesting to work with the raw data that comes directly from the place, and second, because in times of ecological and political crisis, this engagement feels essential.
In our collective’s work, I try to find a way to fuse the immersive nature of audiovisual installation with documentary truth. The immersiveness that can communicate without being transformed into words, and the documentary approach that channels signals from the territory, whether they come from human memories, the activity of microorganisms, or industrial infrastructures.
This way, the environment can bypass human interpretation and enter directly into our sensory field. We can think of it as mediating the voices of a territory, which are often invisible.
In our last performance with Chloé, we used microscopic projections coming directly from microflora and fauna samples collected in Étang de Berre, like a live broadcast, a documentary.
Patrick Degeorges
So, Bulat, when you speak about representation, about the plurality of perspectives of the river and of reality, is this what you mean by documentary truth?
Bulat Sharipov
Yes, exactly.
Patrick Degeorges
Building on what you have just explained, I would like to come back to the question of the public. Your artistic practices, especially in relation to the river, are not about producing artworks but about creating experiences that circulate, generate effects, change behaviours and ultimately affect quality of life. These are relational effects.
In this type of operational and situated practice, how do people come in? How is a public constructed? What does it mean to be a public in these practices, when we are no longer in the classical ritual of art — where everything is organised around a work and the roles of everyone are clearly defined? What is the mode of engagement here?
Chloé Mazzani
The Alchemical Museum is a good example. It is not an exhibition, but a protocol that emerged from workshops. Over the past years, with the project Made in the River, we have run many workshops, often supported through public policies aimed at raising awareness among local residents about environmental risks, particularly flood risks. We also received funding from institutions such as the DRAC for this type of public engagement.
Our starting point was simple: if people are to become aware of flood risks, they must first be reconnected to the existence of the river itself. The river has largely become an invisible technical object, something closer to a drain or a piece of infrastructure than a living entity. No amount of catastrophe-oriented communication works if people have no lived relationship with the river. There is a gap between the abstract discourse on risk and everyday experience.
Our proposal was therefore to change the relationship to the river, so that prevention and awareness could gain depth, meaning and relevance for people’s daily lives.
The project initially developed completely outside the art world, long before we were shown in more traditional artistic contexts, such as after receiving the COAL Prize 2024 – mention Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles Paris. We worked with local residents, social centres, and people living along the river — not with an “art public”. One decisive series of workshops was carried out with “les Cascadeurs”, a work-integration group from the Cité des arts de la rue. One of their missions is to maintain and clean a section of the river.
We wanted to valorise this work, and to ensure that cleaning the river would not be experienced as humiliating, boring or degrading, but as something meaningful and even magical. This is where the idea of “alchemy” came in: the river is chemically polluted, but it is also a place of transformation. The Alchemical Museum protocol gives a new dimension to the act of collecting waste, turning it into an almost artistic gesture.
Today, this protocol is used during clean-up actions, often by people who come with an ecological motivation and unexpectedly find themselves inside an artistic experience.
Patrick Degeorges
So you have developed a practice that can continue beyond your own presence — which is crucial for the sustainability of a project. You have created a form of artistic experience that transforms the perception of clean-up work, turning what might feel like drudgery into a relational, meaningful engagement with the environment, and this can be shared and taken up by others?
Chloé Mazzani
Exactly. We have created a small, portable “pocket museum”, a visual device, but we are also working on a printed leaflet that documents what we experience with people during clean-ups. One of our main ambitions is that the Alchemical Museum protocol can be used in our absence.
This is already happening in an informal way with the Gammares collective, a group of local residents, artists and researchers who take care of the Aygalades river. The three of us have connection with the Gammares collective, it has been a real incubator for the project MITR.. We shared the idea with them, and now, when they organise clean-ups, they use the protocol independently. They even send us photos of their “discoveries”. It has become a way of doing things. We activate it, but then it no longer depends on us.
Patrick Degeorges
You have created something like a score or a script for engaging in river clean-up.
Charlie Fox
Chloé spoke about revalorising clean-up work, especially with the Cascadeurs, who already have a strong relationship with the river. What we gave them was permission to celebrate that relationship — and to celebrate the enchantment of the river itself.
The Aygalades is often seen as an industrial sewer, but when you go down there, it can be incredibly beautiful: the light, the plants, the water. On some days it feels almost like paradise; on others, it is dry and full of rubbish. We work with this tension between beauty and devastation. Giving people permission to be poetic again, to feel enchanted by the environment, gives them the energy to care for it. Otherwise, it remains just another place to dump waste.
One reason the project worked is that people were already cleaning the river before we arrived. We were lucky to join an existing movement and add another layer to it. We tried to share new ways of looking, so that the first public of participants could become the seed of a broader public. Building trust and changing perception is difficult, especially when you move across different communities.
We are based at the Cité des arts de la rue, so the project sits between art and everyday life. It is art in the streets, but also something else. The materials we use come directly from the river: transformed matter, objects that look like strange creatures emerging from it. For me, these objects speak for another kind of public — a non-human one. They are the voices of all the living beings in the river. The project constantly connects human and non-human worlds.
One of the inspirations for this was reading Svetlana Alexievich. There is a passage where a woman says: “What you are doing is impossible. Leave the soil alone and nature will regenerate despite humans.”⁴ The river, despite everything we do to it, still has the capacity to heal itself. Even in radioactive zones, nature continues to transform and recover, even when humans get sick or die trying to intervene. Radiation is also part of life — it comes from the sun. So the question is how inorganic and organic matter can interact and transform each other.
I was also influenced by thinkers like Donna Haraway⁵ and, through Isabelle Stengers, Alfred North Whitehead⁶ — the idea that everything, down to the smallest molecule, is connected and in relation.
Bulat Sharipov
I would like to conclude by saying that what we do is really about building bridges between art, science and community work. This is made possible by the associations we collaborate with and by the scientific committees linked to our residencies. These partnerships allow for a real exchange of experience. What we learn from them feeds our work, and what we do also contributes to their understanding.
Patrick Degeorges
My second question can be approached from several angles, but it concerns the difficulties, obstacles and forms of resistance you encounter — especially at the institutional level and in terms of economic viability. In projects like yours, you are not operating within the economy of artistic performance in the classical sense. You are “performing” on another register. This was not originally an artistic commission: you responded to a concrete need linked to awareness-raising around environmental risk.
What, then, resists within institutions? Why does it resist, and under what conditions could this change in a positive way? How can such projects be built over the long term, in a way that allows for a diffuse, sustained action that is conscious of its effects on a territory? And how can a viable economy be constructed around this kind of practice?
Bulat Sharipov
It is important to point out that for the past three years our collective has been supported by an organisation in Marseille called EPAGE HuCa. It is not an artistic institution but one devoted to environmental risk management, particularly flooding. It does not fund art as such; rather, it connects environmental institutions and artistic practices through projects like ours.
Patrick Degeorges
Yes, Chloé mentioned earlier that you had positioned your work in relation to organisations dealing with flood-related issues.
Chloé Mazzani
What is interesting is that, although of course there are obstacles, my experience has been less one of resistance than of being unexpectedly well received — even if this always depends on building relationships with very specific people inside institutions. We were able to experiment because we were not alone: we were working with the Gammares collective, and EPAGE HuCa had a real interest in what we were doing. Traditionally, they work with actors who propose standard awareness-raising formats.
What is striking is that in their new call for projects for 2026–27 they explicitly mention “artistic projects encouraged”, whereas this was not the case before. This suggests that something is shifting inside certain institutions. We can also see this in the emergence of art–science relations: there is a growing interest in genuine collaboration, not just in using art as a tool for popularising scientific data.
If there is resistance, it comes from long-standing silos. For centuries, science and art have been separated into the rational and the imaginary. At the moment we are still more in a phase of intention than of fully developed know-how in terms of bringing them together. But in the context of ecological urgency, the limits of purely informational approaches have become obvious. Information alone has not produced sufficient change. These encounters between art, science and lived experience are therefore a form of hope — an attempt to activate transformations that have not yet occurred through other means.
Patrick Degeorges
Indeed, the model according to which correct knowledge should automatically lead to correct action does not work. This suggests the need for other ways of activating our relationship to the milieu. And what you are saying is that, in this regard, you encounter little resistance — or at least less than might be expected.
Chloé Mazzani
Honestly, it could have been much worse.
Patrick Degeorges
In other contexts resistance has been much stronger. But what you are describing is that institutions themselves have reached the limits of an existing model, and that there is a need to imagine something else. This raises the question of duration: do you want to stay in Aygalades for a long time? How do you move from one territory to another when your work is so deeply situated?
Chloé Mazzani
What I realised through the whole Aygalades incubation process — with deeply rooted local actors such as Hôtel du Nord, the Bureau des Guides du GR2013 and the Gammares collective — is that this anchoring does not trap us in one place. We have worked in Berlin, in Paris in the Meudon forest, and elsewhere. We have a method — a way of being present — that can be transposed.
The duration will not always be as long, especially when we do not live on site, but the approach still works. After the COAL Prize, for example, the Centre Wallonie–Bruxelles in Paris invited us to take part in two events. We felt the need to anchor ourselves locally, even if only for three weeks. We ended up working on a small river, the Ru Marivel, inside the Meudon forest, along with local activists such as association Espaces. This confirmed that the method can be applied elsewhere and can still generate something meaningful.
Patrick Degeorges
So there is indeed a capacity for repetition. There is a mode of action, with principles and attentions that structure the work.
Chloé Mazzani
Exactly. As soon as we started working with Hôtel du Nord and Bureau des Guides, walking became central. Sensitive walking outdoors and connection to the needs of those who live on site are some of our core ingredients.
Patrick Degeorges
It resonates with the fact that many such projects begin with sensitive inquiry — walking, experimenting, being present — to work on the level of perception and sensibility. What emerges then depends on the collectives and the contexts involved. The method makes emergence possible, but the outcomes respond to the specific needs of each milieu, human and non-human. Your method is clearly centred on walking, presence and thickening the experience of place.
Charlie Fox
Art provides a space in which experimental methods can be invented — that is part of its magic. You can share a recipe or a protocol, but you never know what will come out of it when others use it. In that sense, it is a parallel methodology to scientific or humanistic ones.
Institutions often struggle to understand this. We were lucky to work from the beginning with Hôtel du Nord, which was already deeply embedded in the local community and which managed the project.
Patrick Degeorges
How did Hôtel du Nord come about?
Charlie Fox
It is a complex story. It was founded by Christine Breton, a researcher who had worked with museums and art institutions in Marseille. Coming from the northern districts of the city, she wanted to create something in a neighbourhood that had been excluded from such initiatives. Through old photographs from 1910, she discovered that the Aygalades river had once been a place for walking, with gardens and a large house nearby. She brought residents together around this memory.
Hôtel du Nord is a cooperative in which citizens can value their local culture, environment and what they consider important. It is not just a building. In France, enormous sums are spent restoring monuments, but very little is invested in rivers, everyday places or the heritage of working-class or immigrant communities. Christine was also involved in the Faro Convention, which recognises the value of community heritage.
Hôtel du Nord functions as a network of hospitality and exchange. It is not limited to art; it is about local culture. This makes it easier to reach people who might feel excluded from the art world, which is often highly selective.
Patrick Degeorges
So Hôtel du Nord, as a kind of local institution, enabled your project by creating links with communities and territories. Without such mediating spaces, artists must build these connections themselves, which takes time — but those connections can eventually become new institutions.
Charlie Fox
Hôtel du Nord is a cooperative rather than a classical institution. It is not the DRAC. The Gammares collective is linked to the Bureau des Guides, which acts as a small institution for artistic ecology in Marseille. Funding for the river came through a European UNICEF-linked project.
At the same time, massive urban development is transforming the valley of the Aygalades. Flood risk, social inequality and environmental degradation are deeply intertwined. The Cascadeurs gardeners are now working on renaturalising the river. This creates new forms of participation, but it also raises questions about power and inequality. We are involved in this, but we are poorly paid. We chose this path because we are committed to it, not because it is economically comfortable.
Bulat Sharipov
I would just add that our network was even larger that year because the project was part of Laboratoire Plastique, an art–science research residency involving several institutions and universities, including biochemistry and sociology departments. This allowed us to test our methodology in other polluted territories north of Marseille, in continuity with Aygalades.
Patrick Degeorges
I would like to come back to the question of money. You have mentioned the issue of limited financial resources, which is in fact a very common situation in the arts — you are not alone in this. But in your case, this is a long-term project that requires a great deal of involvement and commitment. How do you manage to sustain it economically? How do you make it possible to keep working in these conditions?
Bulat Sharipov
For Chloé and me, it is perhaps slightly easier because we have the status of intermittent du spectacle, but that does not mean that our work should not be properly paid. Like many artists, we rely on a combination of different sources of income: workshops, grants, paid artistic residencies, and various project-based forms of support. There is never a single source of funding; it is always a patchwork of different resources.
Charlie Fox
I do not have the intermittent status because I work a lot in London, which puts me in a different relationship to the French system. That system is historically structured around performance: it is not designed for painters or visual artists, but for performers.
During the first two years, we did manage to secure some funding from various sources — for example when we won the COAL Prize in 2024. But this year we have received almost nothing. So the situation is unstable, and in any case it is never enough.
At the same time, I have been able to apply our methodology and our protocol to a river near the Thames in London. As with Carola’s work in India, it is striking to see how each river has its own specific character and creativity, even though the protocol itself is transferable. It is also remarkable that the same types of plastic waste are found everywhere and that their modes of transformation are similar, yet their material qualities vary according to the environment — depending on sun exposure, wind, chemistry, and so on.
In theory, we could even imagine building an entire stadium out of these materials, but that would require enormous financial resources. This brings me back to the way European scientific research is organised, especially through projects such as MOOCs. On paper, the amounts of money allocated to research look generous, but in practice much of it is absorbed by institutions, leaving very little for the people at the bottom who actually do the most interesting and experimental work. In some cases, citizen artists are not paid at all.
For me, what matters is not simply extracting something from a place in order to produce an artwork and then leaving. My engagement in this project is also rooted in a long-term involvement with Hôtel du Nord, through the work of Christine Breton. Another crucial influence has been the publishing house Wildproject, run by Baptiste Lanaspeze. He was also the artistic coordinator of the GR2013 project and has always supported this way of working, as well as the Métropol Trail Network, of which I am a member.
Unfortunately, because of Brexit, we did not receive any funding from this European project, but a MOOC was produced as part of it five years ago. Even so, this whole network of collaborations, publications and artistic-territorial projects continues to shape and sustain our work beyond any single funding stream.
Patrick Degeorges
Many thanks for this interview!
¹ Joseph Beuys (1921–1986), German artist, developed the concept of social sculpture, proposing that art could extend beyond objects and galleries to shape society itself. He argued that every human being has creative potential and that social processes, politics, and everyday interactions could be seen as artistic acts. Beuys’ idea of social art emphasises participation, transformation, and the role of art in fostering social change.
²Rachel Carson (1907–1964), American marine biologist and author, is best known for her book Silent Spring (1962), which raised public awareness about the environmental impact of pesticides and contributed to the modern environmental movement. Her writings often reflect a deep curiosity about nature from a young age, which, for many artists and environmentalists, including the members of MITR, inspired early engagement with rivers and natural ecosystems.
³ Joseph Beuys’ critique of the instrumentalisation of art — the reduction of art to purely aesthetic or economic functions — emphasizes the artist’s role in fostering collective creativity, social engagement, and ecological awareness.
⁴ Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (New York: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005). In this work, Alexievich collects testimonies revealing how human intervention has affected the land and natural environment, highlighting the resilience of nature and the limits of human control.
⁵ Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). Haraway explores multispecies entanglements and the need for collaborative, situated ways of thinking and acting in ecological and social systems.
⁶ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978); Isabelle Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). These authors articulate a vision of the world in which everything, down to the smallest molecule, is interconnected and in continuous relation, emphasizing relationality, becoming, and the co-constitution of all entities.
