This conversation between Nathalie Blanc and Olivier Darné reflects on eight years of Zone Sensible, the urban farm and site of artistic, ecological, and social experimentation developed by the Parti Poétique in Seine-Saint-Denis. Olivier Darné speaks of the joy of bringing to life a space of multiple hospitalities — human, vegetal, animal — while also confronting structural, economic, and political fragilities. He describes how this place, conceived as a commons and a territory for taking action, has become a genuine laboratory of habitability, notably through the H Lab. Together, they explore the potential collaborations between researchers and artists, the scaling-up of transformative practices, and the challenges of territorial governance. Olivier also revisits his own trajectory — from public imagery to bees, and then to the farm — as a political and poetic continuity of “care”. The interview questions the capacity of such micro-territories to resist, to invent other ways of living, and to become operative sites of action-research in the face of contemporary environmental and social crises.
Nathalie Blanc
Thank you again, Olivier, for agreeing to this interview. We first met in 2017 or 2018, at the moment when you created this place. At the time, we had already launched the European programme La Table et le Territoire, and we were thinking about how to work together here, between research and art. This eventually resulted in the publication Récits Recettes, which was very well received — people still talk about it a lot. A collaboration began to take shape. You were very enthusiastic about this place then: you dreamed of creating a culinary academy; some things came to be, others not.
Today, given the difficulties you mentioned — diminished support from public authorities, particularly the municipality but not only; the general fragility of such places in a context of crisis and political polarisation — how would you imagine rekindling this place through work with researchers? What avenues do you see today for continuing to transform the territory?
Olivier Darné
Looking back over these eight years, it has been a great joy: the joy of conceiving this place, projecting it, making it exist, and even now being “midstream”, observing the path travelled. The magic did not come only from us, but from the possibility we sparked to multiply hospitalities. Today, these hospitalities measure five or six metres high: they are the trees — 470 trees planted here. The hospitalities are human, vegetal, animal, relational: researchers, artists, insects, students… It has gone far beyond what we imagined.
But it is not a paradise populated by friendly creatures: the difficulties have been numerous, expected and unexpected. What concerns us today is the time required: long time. The challenge is that this place outlives us, that it be recognised in its own right. At the beginning, we were neither market gardeners nor experts in agroecology. I had beekeeping skills, a bit of gardening, but nothing on the scale of one hectare. And yet we embarked on an adventure that commits us almost politically: to preserve this life-giving soil.
This place is not just a site of experimentation or artistic hospitality: it is not a circus — or if so, a committed circus. Not simply a place where “performances are put on”, but a space where we share questions and attempt to connect what matters to us: nature, culture, nourishment.
The difficulties also come from the question of remaining grounded: how to make this a place that is not detached, but linked to the concerns of the territory, to the crises amplified by Covid? The pandemic revealed the importance of places like this. And above all, the beauty lies in the unimaginable part of “Zone Sensible”: the way people have appropriated the project, shifted it, and allowed it to trace its own path.
Nathalie Blanc
And how do you imagine, today, a collaboration between this place and researchers? One could imagine chemists, geographers… even a laboratory of terrestrial habitability. In your dreams — wild or otherwise — what would that look like?
Olivier Darné
This idea of “terrestrial habitability” speaks to me strongly. Fifteen years ago, I made an image-text that read: “Meanwhile, the Earth is becoming uninhabitable…”. Inventing “Zone Sensible” was already creating a territory of habitability. I had never lived on a hectare in Île-de-France, never signed a 25-year lease — almost a generation. It was a blank page, a field of possibilities — but not solely in the service of the ego of an artist or collective. Rather a ground for transformative practices, which is precisely what we are working on today.
From the start, I knew that a curve of fatigue would run parallel to a curve of enthusiasm. The most difficult part was finding a viable economic model, one that would allow us to move beyond a logic of “season 1, season 2, season 3…”. We started with a budget of zero, yet needed to build a permanent team, and to find coherence between our initial axes, current challenges, and the need to bring people on board for the long term.
The initial objective was already to make this a research site. I did not yet speak of transformative practices, but of a “territory for taking action”. This one hectare — too large for one person alone — became a commons: a space that nourishes, questions, challenges climate change and our disembodied urban lives.
Supported by the Fondation de France¹, we developed the “H Lab” — the “hectare laboratory” — over the past seven years. The aim was to understand the added value of “subtraction”: how, alongside artistic and pedagogical programming, one might establish scientific expertise that observes what the Parti Poétique produces in this territory — beyond vegetables.
For maintaining agricultural practice here is already extremely difficult. But we discovered that we were fulfilling unexpected functions: a place of landing for people in distress, in professional transition, anxious about the future. The H Lab made it possible to work on this: the question of care, of caring for a farm, a hectare, as for a living organism.
I do research despite myself, as a visual artist. What would be beautiful today is to see how the questions of other researchers might naturally land here, intersect with our intuitions — or our weaknesses — and generate fertile biases. Without dogmatism. To pose vertical questions on this specific territory: Seine-Saint-Denis, at the crossroads of Stains, Pierrefitte, Le Bourget — which we hear — and ourselves. And I believe we are only halfway toward what could be done.
Nathalie Blanc
I completely agree. And I’m already asking myself the question: if I want to submit this idea, it will have to be written. I’m therefore trying to think about what practices combining art and science could be developed here. There are practices that make the place a resource: a space beneficial for health, a place of education for schools, etc.
There is a truly singular relationship to the territory here, one that could spread elsewhere. How might one think about such dissemination? Could we also experiment on the political or governance side? To what extent have the authorities been involved — or perhaps begun to lose interest? You told me the current municipality is far less engaged. How do you interpret this disengagement: is it only budgetary or something deeper?
Olivier Darné
To understand this, I wanted to transpose elsewhere all the positive and questioning dimensions of the project: I went to the Camargue to see whether what we had learned here held once de-territorialised, and how Camargue agricultural practices and knowledge — rooted in a productive territory — might, in return, nourish the experience of this farm, which is now a vestige: the last farm here. And as the cranes rise, it increasingly becomes an oasis, therefore a site of resistance.
But resistance to what? We are at the heart of a metropolis of 12 million inhabitants; at this scale, we cannot respond alone to climate, carbon, or food issues. The interest of this place lies elsewhere: not in feeding the city, but in producing uses, experiences, and engagements for diverse publics — and above all, avoiding cliques, whether festive, activist, or scholarly. Closed circles that self-legitimise do not build anything.
I no longer even know whether we have the right to be optimistic, but many of us are imagining micro-territories of resistance, all over the world. At the scale of a street or neighbourhood, people want to engage in commons. And to relearn care: the link to soil remains profoundly therapeutic.
Nathalie Blanc
To go further, we might need to look beyond the farm or the Parti Poétique as such. To imagine a research-creation project capable of deploying this approach at a territorial scale. Is that conceivable today?
Olivier Darné
Of course. And even to imagine zones of passage, of transmission. You said: “the Parti Poétique for itself” — but the Parti Poétique does not exist for itself. Like bees: they pollinate to survive, but their action exceeds their individual existence. For 40 million years, insects that live 45 days have produced unbroken continuity: that’s the lesson. What we do belongs to action-research.
But be careful: we are living through economic, political, even “tribal” tension. In this escalation, the question is: what do we do, at our scale? Bees, market gardening, and above all the table offer illuminating answers. The table is perhaps the most beautiful commons: it is through food that I found the most generous artistic gesture.
Zone Sensible was conceived as a farm of world food cultures, because the plant biodiversity here must answer to the cultural biodiversity of the territory’s 150 nationalities. But we face budget cuts, a logic of ever-shrinking slices of cake. The aim is not to maintain a production tool for its own sake — I do not want to become a manager. What matters is to remain available, flexible, able to welcome skills we do not have.
And we clearly see that this place has served as a support space for many kinds of people: anthropologists, foreign researchers, Japanese visitors… We have become a subject of curiosity, sometimes praised. But this neither sustains us financially nor operationally. We are at a moment where it is no longer a matter of theorising, but of demonstrating.
Nathalie Blanc
And demonstrating means rolling out concrete actions elsewhere, not only hospitality or discourse. What implementations do you imagine for a real action-research project?
Olivier Darné
We must let go of the idea that we still live in a “gentle world”. Tensions are intense, in cities and in rural areas — conventional agriculture shows this clearly. This noise blurs our reading of what is happening.
For a research scenario, we might need to take stock of fragilities and breaking points. To forget for a moment who is speaking — artist, farmer — and clearly examine our immediate and distant futures. To imagine that they contain tipping points, rather than living in fear or paralysis. We are at an extraordinary moment: a paradigm shift, an end of a world — or of the world as we knew it. It is a magnificent catastrophe. We must accept this mourning.
The challenge would be to invent a synchronisation between sadness and optimism. To look for solutions, even modest ones: this is more liveable than watching the sun set while waiting for the end. But what strikes me in many current projects is the gap between intentions — often beautiful — and the actual scale of the issues. This renders them inoperative.
We need to gather worlds that face the same difficulties but do not pool their resources. Foundations, businesses, public authorities could stop talking and create conditions for genuinely operative teams to implement full-scale scenarios. What saddens and irritates me is that the most valid projects are almost never at the right scale.
We are missing a lever. We do not have the networks, communication services, or relays. Everyone stays within their own language and alliances. We lack bridge-territories. Perhaps researchers would be listened to more than artists — perhaps not. In any case, we would need to invent transmission and amplification mechanisms that do not yet exist. For me, this is the essential challenge.
Nathalie Blanc
It’s fascinating, as a researcher, to work on questions of scale without having an immediate answer. And in all this, what is the role of technologies? I recently met someone from La Ferme Digitale, a network of about thirty associations and companies promoting digitised agriculture.
What do you think of this? Do you imagine that a place like this could become an experimental setting for these questions, a place farmers could visit? Or does your relationship with ecology make these perspectives incompatible?
I’m asking because, as Director of the Centre des politiques de la Terre, I pushed for a major conference on “technological ecology” to take place in June, bringing together researchers from across Europe. I feel that ecologists missed an appointment: they are being overtaken by the digital world. We must regain ground, scientifically and politically. How do you see this?
Olivier Darné
I think we must revive all dialogues, or build them where they do not exist. We should never assume that this world — the digital — has nothing to do with our challenges. But we must keep only the operative dialogues: those that land, touch the ground, become operational, allow demonstrations, create leverage.
I am not connected to the digital reality of the world. But these professions, these engineers, may have keys to interpretation — just as bees, despite themselves, developed expertise that shaped the way we think about the city. They offered an objective viewpoint… a bee’s point of view. And that point of view was extraordinary because it was transdisciplinary. I could never have invented that alone. Every dialogue is invented collectively. But to do this, we must create a table: a space for conversation, listening, with deadlines, because we do not have much time left.
Nathalie Blanc
I’m knitting ideas in my mind as I listen, and I’m glad we’re meeting today. One question that troubles me: I’m conducting a study for the City of Paris — and for myself, and for the Centre — on how upper classes respond to ecological transition.
We had worked on working-class communities, then on municipal services. Now we are opening two experimental districts — working-class and upper-class areas. I am meeting many people and conducting interviews with them.
Olivier Darné
People who don’t know where to direct their energy?
Nathalie Blanc
It’s more complicated. The upper classes are caught in compromises: one flight a year, then two, then three… organic food, local produce, etc. And at the same time, a sense of powerlessness, a very pervasive pessimism. Out of a hundred people, only two display something resembling you: a capacity to transform themselves, to unsettle themselves, to try to see beyond.
So I wonder: how do you understand your own trajectory? You were a graphic designer, making posters for the territory where you grew up — a rather “disembodied” practice, if I remember correctly — then you became a beekeeper, and then you did everything that led you here. And recently, your project in Camargue, Regain. You told me: “There, I have the opportunity to test methods developed here and put them to the test on another territory.”
What are these methods? How do you read this thread?
Olivier Darné
I began by producing images in public space. “Disembodied”, perhaps, but not “meaningless”. What interested me was the signal emitted by an image when one speaks in public space. And there was a real missed rendez-vous: we do not teach image literacy in school. Children are saturated with images without mastering the codes, which produces manipulable generations. Images are perfect for manipulating minds.
What led me to occupy public space was also sadness: I realised there was no dialogue. Only a monologue placed in space: the image is there, people read it, laugh or not, agree or not… and I am not there; no discussion is possible. This frustration pushed me to seek sharing — even if sharing produces anger and tension.
Bees brought me something else: the invisible. They gave me what I called “the pollination of the city”: a harvest belonging neither to the beekeeper nor to the bees. The hive became a teaching space. It tells the story of the city: social and political organisation, the notion of a common but private harvest, the possibility of looting… It was fascinating, marvellous. I wanted to share it. And I understood that my practice needed to move away from graphic design and more towards the visual arts: more freedom, more materials, more spaces.
There is a beautiful link between bees and earthworms — as shown by the work of Stéphanie Sagot. The earthworm is a bee of the soil. We’ll talk about that on a rainy day.
Producing honey in the city meant producing a pirate harvest: I was cultivating the city without owning the soil. A hive covers a three-kilometre radius — 3,000 hectares in a jar of honey. I could offer inhabitants the taste of the neighbourhood they live in — a gustatory image, and there, finally, a dialogue.
But one can no longer rejoice in making urban honey when bees are dying everywhere. When I saw their decline, I felt it necessary to explain politically what this means, what it signals. I have been working with them for nearly 30 years. And what happened in the countryside is now happening in the city.
Two years ago, in Saint-Denis, I lost 100% of my hives. Eighty hives dead in a week. In a place that was supposedly protected. The causes are twofold: globalisation and climate change. The Asian hornet sits at their intersection: arriving in containers from China, and now, with very high temperatures in September–October, nests become gigantic while bee colonies shrink.
As a producer of harvests, I told myself that beekeeping needed to be reconsidered: it is a new bank. This is how the Bank of Honey was born: a bank of the living. In two years, 2,800 members — France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway — invested money to transform dead capital into living bees. I thought: there is a shared worry, and money is a form of energy. So we could create collections.
This is how I launched Trésor Public, which follows on. The idea is to pool our anxieties and a little energy to preserve life. Not a Noah’s ark, but a vault of life.
And at some point I told myself: there is no point saving the bees if we do not save the environments. In Paris, it is hard to find an environment. When the call for proposals to take over this farm — the last 19th-century farm still active at the gates of Paris — was launched, I saw a unique opportunity to work life-size on preserving life, with humility. Through transformative practices, wonder, sharing.
We are already engaged in a form of action-research, a path. And today is the time to align tensions, anxieties, talents, expertise. To make inventories: inventories of tenderness, of worry, of economic fragilities. Covid revealed this: fragilities multiplied.
During Covid, while everything had stopped, I had a permit — beekeepers were allowed to travel. I thought: let’s show that Zone Sensible is a political farm. Restaurants were closed; so we stopped supplying them and produced vegetables for people struggling to make ends meet. We had three months of cash flow. We did it, sought funding, and carried on throughout 2020, then 2022, 2023, up to today.
It was a moment when everything could have stopped. We had lost 70% of our funding in a year. But it was also a moment to lay everything bare: what do we love doing, what are we able to do, what have we failed to do, what do we need?
Perhaps such moments call for new forms of cooperation.
Nathalie Blanc
And these methods you say you were able to test at Regain in the Camargue, what are they?
Olivier Darné
They involve the same dramas as here. First, I observe that the inhabitants of the Bouches-du-Rhône eat as they do here: supermarkets, Friday and Saturday trolleys. The same sociotypes. True, access to producers is a bit easier there when one lives far from the centre of Paris — but it’s not so different.
Regain is two things:
A heritage farm, a 400-year-old mas, formerly agricultural but separated from its land and abandoned. The idea: to reattach life-giving soil to it. It is a family project, but also a way of restoring a production tool.
Drawing on the experience here, we can create a multifunctional entity that remains a farm. Farms have always been the political spaces of future times: food, landscape, water, air, soil, carbon — everything concentrates there. It is also a site for artistic experimentation. For me, art and agriculture are the same muscle, the same dough.
When contemporary art does not speak to someone, their stomach does. With honey, and then with vegetables here, we bring people into artistic sensibilities who might never enter a museum. On a farm, the white cube is forgotten: artists’ concerns — which are also inhabitants’ concerns — are displayed in the open air, as long as the levels of language remain accessible and we avoid intellectual closed circles. These then become interesting sites of friction.
Zone Sensible is observed — we receive collaboration requests year after year. It’s very touching. We would love to say yes to everything, but today, we must consolidate the entity, maintain it, develop it with a research perspective. The questions of eight years ago are no longer those of today, and we must anticipate those that will emerge from recurring crises.
Nathalie Blanc
And you, from the research side, how do you see things?
Olivier Darné
For me, it is an unknown world. I am a Monsieur Jourdain of research: I do it with my own tools, handcrafted, intuitive, without scientific training. What connects us, I believe, is a shared sensibility — joys, and also moments when everything can tip over. And a way of investing our anger.
I would be delighted if someone observed what we do — to better understand, better channel what we do.
¹The Fondation de France is the leading independent philanthropic organisation in France. Each year, it supports thousands of projects serving the public interest in the fields of solidarity, health, research, the environment and culture, by mobilising donors, patrons and practitioners on the ground.
