In this interview conducted by Anaïs Roesch, Julie Navarro sensitively retraces her journey as an artist – from her early poetic perception of the world to the development of a practice deeply rooted in place. Through a singular trajectory that weaves together political engagement, aesthetic research and attentiveness to the living world, she speaks of a body of work in constant motion, nourished by relationships, the materiality of flows, and the evanescence of the real. From founding the Les Uns chez les Autres festival in Paris’s 19th arrondissement to creating a “community of peatlands” in the Creuse, Navarro explores art’s transformative potential by combining collaborative practices, visual gestures and shared narratives. The conversation reveals a multifaceted vision of the artist, in which the sensory, the political and the playful intertwine to invent renewed forms of attentiveness to the world and its fragilities.
Anaïs Roesch: Could you tell me what led you to become an artist?
Julie Navarro: It was not a choice that presented itself straight away, but rather a gradual process. From childhood, I had a distinctive way of perceiving the world. My gaze was finely attuned to details, instinctively drawing poetic analogies from what I noticed.
I grew up in Paris, while maintaining a deep connection to the countryside – particularly the Creuse, where my parents owned a house. This place, steeped in a family history of wartime resistance, has always been a fertile space for my imagination. My father, a paediatrician with a passion for history, and my mother, who studied art history, passed on to me their appreciation for modern and contemporary art. Art was present in my life as a source of inspiration and breathing space.
Anaïs Roesch: And after your baccalauréat, did you go directly into artistic training?
Julie Navarro: No, I began with economics. I had an appetite for learning and a broad curiosity. With an interest in the sciences, I pursued my studies to the level of a master’s degree in banking and finance. But I soon felt a deep sense of disconnection. The world of finance did not answer my need for contact with the sensory dimension of life.
I returned to study art history, alongside working for a publishing house. This return to my fundamental needs was exhilarating, even if I had not yet considered the conditions for my artistic practice, which developed later, through successive shifts.
Anaïs Roesch: At what point did artistic practice take a real place in your life?
Julie Navarro: Since my teenage years, I had been painting in an expressive style with a fairly soft palette of colours. At thirty, I exhibited my work for the first time in a Paris gallery. It was very well received, which encouraged me to continue.
At the same time, my relationship to art was opening up to more collective practices, linked to my social and political commitments. My involvement in associations led me to take on responsibilities: I worked for the “2000 in France”¹ mission chaired by Jean-Jacques Aillagon, then in Jack Lang’s office at the Ministry of Education, where I was responsible for youth communications. I was later commissioned to tour Europe to exchange and promote young people’s community initiatives. These experiences shaped my political awareness and my ability to connect culture, engagement and concrete territorial action.
The turning point came when I was invited to join a municipal list in the 19th arrondissement. I accepted enthusiastically, recognising the scope for cultural invention and artistic experimentation. This is how the Les Uns chez les Autres festival was born: a monthly, off-site artistic programme. Its aim was to invest the city’s in-between spaces, to meet its inhabitants and local communities, drawing on artistic narratives that could foster encounters and shift perspectives on the city and its often identity-bound communities. Some editions had a strong impact, such as CARNE, an art trail through local butcher shops where we showcased sixty artists to question the transformation of meat, in a tense community context between Jewish and Muslim residents. Another was CHINAFRIQUE, an exhibition intersecting local and geopolitical issues. The festival became a genuine platform for experimentation – a laboratory for creation and social connection – giving contemporary art a grounded sense of purpose.
Anaïs Roesch: What prompted you to step away from that position?
Julie Navarro: I realised that, under the weight of so many demands, I was moving away from what made me feel most alive: my capacity for wonder and my desire for poetry. Politics, even at the local level, requires great availability and a constant public presence. I felt the erosion of the free time I needed to return to a necessary, intimate artistic practice. I do not regret that mandate – on the contrary, it was rich in meaning, formative, and greatly nourished the collective dimension rooted in my work.
I found the perfect refuge in the peatland landscapes of the Creuse. Having been familiar with their enigmatic beauty since childhood, I decided to embrace their mysteries methodically and step by step. I began by photographing the soil’s surface, then delved into its depths through fruitful collaborations with palynologists, farmers and researchers. My observations, learnings, and physical encounters with the embodied earth transformed this territory into a poetic and sensory laboratory. I committed my whole body and imagination to this landscape, which carries a powerful historical weight. Peatlands are living archives, rich wetlands that preserve – thanks to their scientific properties of anoxia and acidity – the memory of the ties between people and landscape. I felt this memorial power rising to the surface like a light, subtle memory. It stimulated my artistic research into the materiality of the invisible. My series Inaperçus Rose et Bleu Poudre and Blanche Céleste bear witness to this.
Anaïs Roesch: How did your work evolve from there?
Julie Navarro: In reality, the territorial mechanism I developed for Les Uns chez les Autres in Paris, I transposed into the peatland landscape. My aim was to foster dialogue between the landscape and its non-human inhabitants – its vegetation, fauna and flora – as well as with the people I met along the way. Rather than programming artists into a set itinerary, I built visual and sculptural narratives through my imagination and exchanges with the community I created, made up of farmers, stonemasons, school pupils, musicians, local residents and so on. You can see the body of work on my website; I named it Droséra, la tentation du paysage, inspired by the eponymous carnivorous plant.
My artistic vocabulary grew more defined, nourished by my interest in relationships, flows and energies in motion. I identified two main strands in my practice: first, my studio works – evanescent and abstract – which distil my sensory perceptions of the outside world; and second, my in situ works, encompassing sculpture, installation and collaborative performance. These engage in direct dialogue with the territory and its scientific, anthropological and heritage dimensions.
Fascinated by physical phenomena such as refraction, reflection and oscillations of light, I have worked with labile materials that make the most of these effects, such as tulle (in my Vibrations series), tracing paper, cellular polycarbonate and dichroic glass. My works change with the sky, the light, the weather, or the movement of spectators. Their perception is thus fleeting and unstable – much like reality itself. I often speak of the “evanescence of the real world”, a central notion in my work. Nothing is fixed; everything is in motion and in discreet relation.
Anaïs Roesch: I’d like to return to the political dimension of your path. On the one hand, have you felt the urge to reconnect with more directly political, curatorial or cultural projects, as you did when you were elected? And on the other, do you see a continuity between that political experience and your artistic practice – especially in relation to the public? Having once had such a direct link with voters, how does that extend or reconfigure itself in your connection with audiences today?
Julie Navarro: Perhaps the continuity lies in integrity! (laughs) And also in the desire to shift perspectives and move boundaries – both literally and figuratively. I feel I have carried on along the same path. I have moved from the very collective to a more intimate approach, without ever feeling I have abandoned anything. The place I give to defending emancipatory ideas, to poetic resistance, and to inventing new practices remains intact. I am still an activist, and my activism now flows through my projects.
I enjoy engaging diverse audiences through participatory works, whose creative processes, in my view, act on reality by shifting perspectives on an object, a function or an environment. The question of audience is central to me and deeply fascinating. I alternate between solitary creative phases and others that are socially grounded, built around shared practices. I do not see these as mere subsidised activities, but as opportunities for transformation through contact with others. I feel that reciprocity and work to develop initiatives that benefit groups often rendered invisible.
I also have, as Romain Gary put it, a “surplus of tenderness” to share – which I channel into the relational and emotional effervescence of my projects. The audiences I involve are enthusiastic and loyal. The voguing balls I organised at the Centre Pompidou or Rosa Bonheur with older participants unlocked unsuspected energies. My commitment translates into creating situations where different forms of otherness meet and transform each other at the margins.
The performance balls I held at the Centre Pompidou or Rosa Bonheur with older people revealed unexpected vitality. The Silver Ball project – a danceable sculpture combining performance and choreographed play with older people and children – became a powerful driver of collective transformation. The workshops held throughout the year greatly contributed to this momentum. Time (to build trust!), play and dance enabled people in difficulty – whether children or older adults – to reclaim their bodies and their stories. I am delighted that this activatable protocol work has entered the public collections of the CNAP. Silver Ball represented three years of work, at the end of which I passed on a set of instructions to CNAP so that others could take it up.
It was at that point that I began fully embracing the importance of play in my practice. This playful dimension is essential to me: it allows me to sustain a state of wonder, amusement and surprise, which I see as fundamental to feeling alive.
Anaïs Roesch: I was curious to hear more from you on the question of transformation, which seems to me to be at the heart of your life—philosophically, but also in your practice, particularly in its research dimension, as you’ve described it to me. Perhaps you could shed some light on this through an example?
Julie Navarro: I’ve told you about the balls and their joyful effervescence, as well as the notions of flow that run through my work. Let’s return to the kinds of interactions I like to foster. In terms of materials, I use mobile supports that enable shifting perceptions of the immediate environment. The light in my works—whether studio pieces or in situ—varies according to the viewer’s position and atmospheric conditions. Nothing is fixed, nothing is predetermined.
The same applies to my performances, where I explore the conditions for change, even transformation. I like to think of Deleuzian “machine-organs”² where everything is flow: but what generates the flow? Who generates it? How does it circulate?
An example is the ephemeral performance Œil de bœuf, which I staged at Piacé le Radieux thanks to the invitation of Nicolas Hérisson. I placed participants on all fours so that they grazed grass—mainly oyster plants with an iodised taste—like cows in a hayrack, here reimagined through a shell of dichroic Plexiglas with shifting reflections. I wanted to question the animal being and its complete otherness. Photographs of the participants revealed highly varied attitudes. The postures were poetic, sexual, sometimes threatening, owing to the prison-like grid structure of the hayrack. The reflections in the Plexiglas enclosing this small structure helped blur boundaries. It became impossible to tell who was doing what, or which reflection was real. A few days later, I received emails recounting the experience from the perspective of the human “grazers”, whose empathy towards animals had left indelible traces.
Another example, more anchored in time, is the community experience in the peat bogs, which I’ve already mentioned. Since 2014, I have developed, in several acts, a body of work in collaboration with farmers, scientists, schoolchildren and local shopkeepers, resonating with the millennia-old landscape and the threats posed by climate change. This project continued, thanks to COAL, in Riga with FREE BOG! (tourbière libre !) in Latvia in 2022, bringing together artists and curators from across Europe.
Anaïs Roesch: How did this community around the peat bogs come into being? Could you tell us a bit about that process?
Julie Navarro: It happened quite instinctively. Having trained in territorial experience at the end of 2013 with a Paris festival, I didn’t intend to consume narratives to feed my work, but rather to invent shared narratives and fictions through collective investigative practices. For example, I initiated the International Peat Brick Throwing Competition with a motley group of amused participants.
The proposals I put forward naturally rested on an ecological and scientific foundation, aimed at defending this vital ecosystem. Peat bogs play a crucial role in carbon storage, contributing to the fight against global warming.
The poetic and choreographic dimension of my action-based projects engaged our bodies in intimate gestures with, and within, the landscape. With children, we shaped small peat figures called tornà, an Occitan word meaning “ghost”. I photographed them and printed them on large sheets of tracing paper. When I presented them at the Château de Vassivière – Centre International d’Art et du Paysage, superimposed one on another, it felt as though we were conversing with the spirits of our ancestors.
In collaboration with stone mason Pierre Nourrisseau, we created a stone engraved with the word cosmotourbe—a neologism born during a writing workshop with secondary school pupils. The letters were engraved in reverse on a slab the size of an old peat brick (50 cm), allowing the word to be imprinted on the ground at will, like a litany.
At that time, I was deeply inspired by the Irish writer Seamus Heaney. His intimate and powerful poems about the Irish bogs strengthened the connections I was weaving between literature, material and the memory of the landscape. I borrowed one of his images for my book Je vois le ciel au fond du puits (I See the Sky at the Bottom of the Well), with a preface by the philosopher, theorist and art critic Yves Michaud. For me, this title evokes the telluric power of the bogs, these vast black mirrors reflecting the changing sky and human activity…
Anaïs Roesch: You published that book for the 2016 exhibition at Vassivière, is that right?
Julie Navarro: In fact, the exhibition unfolded in two stages. I presented the book in Paris in an exhibition organised by curator and critic Laurent Quénéhen, and then immediately afterwards at the Château de Vassivière – artist residency of the Architecture and Heritage Interpretation Centre (CIAP in french).
Anaïs Roesch: And all those workshops, meetings, exhibitions… Did they help strengthen this community?
Julie Navarro: Absolutely. Although everything developed quite naturally, these public moments greatly consolidated the bonds. The workshops foster encounters around the subject of shared action, and then between the participants themselves. Afterwards, the exhibition of the works highlighted all these collaborations, leading to a multiplication of invitations. Scientists contacted the press at each soil sampling or event; children shared their experiences with their parents; teachers exchanged with local councillors; shopkeepers chatted with residents. In short, a true micro-society began to take shape.
One participant, Michel Foucault—with his athlete’s build—became the mascot of the project. Many of these people would never have met otherwise. At the Vassivière opening, they all turned up, proud and united, in a place they would never have dared enter before. That is when human magic happens—revealing the unexpected beauty of the living world. For me, that is what a community is: a relational ecosystem bringing together very different individuals through imagination, collective work and shared wonder. Everything becomes intertwined—a drawing purchased, a commission, a project in Aubusson… Imagination takes root.
Anaïs Roesch: And is this peat bog project the last one you’ve undertaken? Are you still continuing with this Vassivière community?
Julie Navarro: In fact, this community is becoming international. I received support from the ADAGP³ for a project in England, in the northern peat bogs, in collaboration with Laura Harrington, an artist-researcher who, like me, is often referred to as the “Bog Lady” of that region. Although the project could not be fully realised due to scheduling conflicts with my British colleagues, everyone is enthusiastic about taking it up again.
Since 2022, my peat bog observations have given rise to a series of paintings entitled Vibrations. I mentioned them at the start of our conversation. These abstract works, imbued with movement and light, are created outdoors in the bogs. The activity and its process feed my desire to merge with the energy of the living and the cosmos. My summer exhibition, Cosmophilie, invited by LIUSA WANG in Paris, is one expression of this, as are my upcoming projects with Galerie Wagner, a landmark in kinetic art. There is something fundamentally chiasmatic in my works and proposals, as the art critic Léon Mychkine has observed.
Anaïs Roesch: Looking back, what has this adventure brought you?
Julie Navarro: An experience rich in interactions and collaborations, highlighting the importance of dialogue between different identities, whether human or non-human. The adventure has made me realise the value of collective work rooted in a shared territory, where trust and time play a crucial role. Giving voice to other forms of life and to the collective imagination reflects a desire to create an inclusive, diverse space. It is a beautiful celebration of plurality and creativity.
Anaïs Roesch: Finally, how would you define what your work produces in the territories?
Julie Navarro: It produces connections, and I hope it also produces sparks of awareness, shifts in perspective. I believe that art, when sincere and sensorial, can help transform our representations and reconnect us with the living. That is the movement I inhabit: interaction, transformation and shared joy. The joy of learning, of being surprised, of experimenting, of knowing oneself better… This increases our capacity to act!
¹ The “2000 in France” mission was established to coordinate nationwide celebrations marking the turn of the millennium. It launched an ambitious cultural, artistic and intellectual programme, emphasising decentralisation and collective reflection, under the banner: “France, Europe, the world – a new momentum.”
² In Anti-Oedipus (1972) , Deleuze and Guattari describe organ-machines as connections between body parts and flows of desire — for example, the mouth linked to eating or speaking. The body is seen as a dynamic network of desiring-machines, rather than a fixed, organic whole.
³ The ADAGP is France’s authors’ society for the visual arts.
