In the face of ecological crises and the profound transformation of our territories, new ways of thinking about collective action have become necessary. In this interview, Patrick Degeorges speaks with Pascal Ferren about the distinctive role that art can play in these transformations.
Trained as a philosopher and working as a practitioner of territorial dialogue and mediation, Pascal Ferren has chosen to adopt an artistic posture in order to intervene in the ecological field. Not to produce artworks, but to invent forms: dialogical devices, institutional fictions, and public scenes capable of transforming the ways we debate, represent the living world, and act politically.
Through his trajectory — from the Parlement de Loire to the Mission Relations — an experimental practice emerges, situated at the intersection of art, philosophy, and public action, where the central concern remains the same: to create concrete conditions for renewed dialogue between humans, institutions, and living environments.
Patrick Degeorges
To begin, I would like to ask you a question that we often address to artists. What does it mean, for you, to adopt an artistic posture in relation to ecological issues and the transformation of territories? Why should art be considered a relevant mode of engagement, especially when these fields are already occupied by experts, scientists, engineers, and institutions?
In your case, the question is even more complex, since you did not initially define yourself as an artist: you are a philosopher, and you were already working on these issues. Yet you chose to adopt an artistic posture in order to intervene in this field. Why this shift? What does it change, and what does it teach us about the role of art in the ecological transition?
Pascal Ferren
I have two answers to this question. The first is very pragmatic, almost cynical, but entirely real. The second is more elegant, but it is deeply connected to the first.
The pragmatic answer is that, in our world, artists benefit from a very particular form of legitimacy. They are granted a freedom to act and to experiment that other actors do not have. This legitimacy makes it possible to do things that could not be done otherwise.
For example, I have just designed and organised, with Bipolar and Raphaël Mathevet, a staged dispositif around the Procès du sel in the Camargue: a theatricalised public inquiry, with farmers, managers, and territorial stakeholders present on stage. If I were not an artist, I could not say to someone, “You have four minutes to speak, you will be lit in a certain way, you enter at this moment.” The artistic posture allows one to frame, to stage, to create a space for collective experimentation, and to assume that the substance of certain issues is inseparable from their form.
It is also linked to a question of resources. Experimental research in urbanism, as I have practised it, is often carried out with very limited means. But organising a public debate on the scale of the Camargue, to continue with that example, requires resources, frameworks, and a capacity to produce situations. The art world offers this. It is a strategic position within a social role-play.
The more “elegant” answer is that there is an aesthetics of worlds to come — or, put differently, a formal work that needs to be done. What interests me is the way we formulate nature, the way we narrate it, the way we institute it. My work often focuses on what I call, following the inspiring work of Camille de Toledo, institutional or administrative fictions around the living world: dispositifs, frameworks, and languages through which we organise our relationship to nature.
Consultation can of course be conducted in a conventional way, using existing participatory tools. But if we want to invent other forms of dialogue, capable of genuinely transforming the ways we think and act, then we need to engage in a process of formal invention — what I call an artistic process.
This means inventing ways of speaking to one another, languages, and dispositifs. For example, a meeting on water regulations or a dam can be organised according to standardised protocols, but it can also be conceived differently: as a scene, with rhythms, durations, lighting, and a dramaturgy.
I am currently working a great deal on the question of rhythm. It is possible to address very difficult issues for long periods of time, provided there is an appropriate temporal and relational structure. This seems obvious in the media, but why should we not work on this within territorial consultation processes or institutions as well?
Within the framework of the Mission Relations, for example, I set up an “evaluation commission” — an institutional fiction — bringing together forty people for more than three hours. The aim is not to do theatre, but to construct a staging of dialogue that allows people to respond to one another, to change formats, and to shift their perspectives. Mission Relations, a possible public service, is itself a fiction-dispositif, incidentally.
It is in this sense that I recognise myself in COAL’s approach and in the notion of transformation. I am also strongly influenced by the work of Stefan Shankland¹, as well as by the PEROU collective² and Sébastien Thiéry³, who seek to “sculpt” worlds to come and to invent future institutions.
Patrick Degeorges
What you describe clearly shows that your two answers — the strategic and the aesthetic — are two sides of the same coin. The artistic posture is both what grants freedom to act and what makes it possible to produce these new forms.
Your field of action, as you describe it, consists in inventing new modalities of public dialogue and consultation around ecological issues.
Pascal Ferren
Yes. I have a scenographic reading of the world. I would not say that “everything is fiction”, but I would say that everything takes place within scenes. Today, ecology is played out on public stages: the National Assembly, the media, television studios. These are often scenes of violence, caricature, sometimes even grotesque.
My work consists in proposing other scenes — scenes of peace, in the sense that people can simply speak to one another there. That is why I am attached to the notion of consultation or public dialogue: it needs to be re-empowered.
Patrick Degeorges
So the aim is to regenerate public debate on ecology and habitability, and to allow people to experiment, here and now, with other forms of collective organisation, through institutional fictions.
Pascal Ferren
Yes, but with a great deal of modesty. My ambition is vast — to open up possible worlds — but my forms are fragile, experimental. I am not working with utopia, in the sense of what ought to be, but with paratopia, to use the expression of the “potentials of time”: what could be.
I work as one would in a workshop. I try things out; some work, others do not. I invite interpreters of nature to speak, they write poems, I place them within public dialogue dispositifs. Sometimes it fails, sometimes it does not — but it is the only way to see what is possible.
Patrick Degeorges
Is this approach also a collective endeavour?
Pascal Ferren
Yes, profoundly so. I always work with producers, teams, interpreters, institutions. My material consists of local authorities, water and nature managers. These are human beings: trust and alliances therefore have to be built.
At the same time, I try to hold certain lines. We live in a world dominated by media logics and trends, which tend to blur everything together. I am sometimes invited to intervene on “the rights of nature”, even though this is not my field of work. I refuse this great mishmash in which everything would be equivalent. I believe in the necessity of methodological disagreements and of clear lines.
For instance, I do not believe that law is always the right starting point. I defend an aesthetic, a singular way of working — what one might pompously call a style.
Patrick Degeorges
Could you trace this “swimming lane” through your trajectory, from the Parlement de Loire to today?
Pascal Ferren
The starting point is very concrete. I was working at Polau, in Saint-Pierre-des-Corps. With Bruno Marmiroli, Lolita Voisin, Virginie Serna, Stéphane Cordobes, Joan Pronnier, and others, we were working around the Loire, water, and the territory in which we lived.
Our question concerned mediation and awareness in the strong sense: how to reconnect inhabitants with the river they depend on; how to show that tap water is always Loire water; how not to reduce the river to a postcard, but to recognise it as a vital system.
We came to understand that the Loire is a hybrid object, combining nature and culture, history and ecology. A decisive example was the wreck of a fifteenth-century barge discovered at Langeais. This wreck is at once a historical artefact, a living habitat for a protected sponge, and a fragment of the river itself. Should it be removed from the water? Left in place? Museumised? Considered a living being?
Through this very concrete object, all the major questions emerge: what is a river today? What is nature? How should it be administered? How do we inhabit a world composed of overlapping layers of time, cultures, and forms of life?
It is from these very material situations that our work developed. These are not abstractions: they are objects, places, and stories that force us to rethink our categories and our institutions.
Patrick Degeorges
The question then becomes: how do we build bridges? How do we enable the experimentation of other worlds? How do we bring forth what one might call inter-worlds — spaces where heterogeneous realities can meet and transform one another?
Pascal Ferren
This is where the question of public debate returns.
The Parlement de Loire was born from a collective rereading of a foundational text by Bruno Latour, Outline for a Parliament of Things (1994). We knew these ideas were already circulating — notably at COAL, around the Rhône — but in rereading the text, we felt there was something there to activate.
We then met Camille de Toledo⁴, who proposed a very precise form: that of the hearings of the Parlement de Loire. This is a crucial point. We had ideas, a collective, an intuition — but without an artistic form to embody them, nothing would have happened. Camille did not “create” the Parlement de Loire on his own, but he created its operative form — and that is what made the whole thing possible.
Patrick Degeorges
What you describe is also a genesis of modes of action. Camille de Toledo, as an artist, brought an institutional structuring inspired notably by Latour’s Politics of Nature — with its chambers, assemblies, and representational dispositifs.
But how did you address, within this framework, the place of science and expertise?
Pascal Ferren
In Latour’s work, science occupies a very strong position — and that is something I greatly value in his early work. He poses a radical question: why should a specialist in sand not be a legitimate political representative of sand? Where does political legitimacy really lie?
This directly opens up the question of representation.
Patrick Degeorges
Yes, because if we want to create these inter-worlds, these new scenes of public debate, we cannot be satisfied with symbolic or sensitive objects alone. These forms need to be operative. How did you work on this issue?
Pascal Ferren
At the Parlement de Loire, we were initially focused on political representation. How can a river be represented within an institutional form?
During the hearings, two lines intersected: that of the rights of nature, strongly carried by Camille de Toledo; and that of the political representation of the river’s own interests, which was more my line.
The underlying question was the same: how can the river’s own interests be made to exist without reducing them to ecosystem services or human uses?
This question can be approached juridically — through rights — or politically — through forms of representation.
But at the end of the Parlement de Loire, I felt uneasy: the concrete political dimension, the real institutional anchoring, had not been worked through sufficiently for my taste. We had produced a powerful conceptual object, but also a potentially misleading one. An “innovative model” can give the illusion that something has changed, when in reality nothing has yet shifted in the real world.
While we were doing the Parlement de Loire, dams were still being built, fish were still disappearing, sediments were no longer circulating. The Parliament was an invitation to act, not yet a transformative tool.
Patrick Degeorges
But you had nonetheless raised the question of the river’s representation within institutions.
Pascal Ferren
Yes, but within a theoretical framework. The Parlement de Loire was a book, a research project — not work carried out with basin committees, water agencies, or local water commissions.
And that is where, for me, something shifts. After the Parlement de Loire, I realised that we needed to move out of theory and look at what actually happens within existing water-management dispositifs — CLEs, SDAGEs, SAGEs, and so on.
And one discovers that these dispositifs, although imperfect, are far from empty. They are already interesting forms of public debate. The task is therefore not to impose an abstract model, nor to multiply declarations of rights, but to work with situated institutional reality.
Patrick Degeorges
So the Parlement de Loire becomes, for you, a founding experience, from which you begin to trace a more precise line of action.
Pascal Ferren
Exactly. This is where I “become an artist”. I decide to hold a swimming lane: to work with local authorities, farmers, industrial actors, situated institutions. To bring worlds into contact. To work within the materiality of reality.
This is not a disagreement with Camille de Toledo, but a difference in lines of action. His work is more intellectual and conceptual. Mine is in the mess of the world as it is.
Patrick Degeorges
This is also what you were already doing at the time of the Assemblée de la forêt of Lichen: exploring which concrete forms of representation could give non-humans a voice in decision-making processes.
Pascal Ferren
Yes. If we say that the interests of nature must be defended, then we have to invent concrete dispositifs to do so. I like methods, protocols, tools. I come from consultation practices: I want to know how things actually work.
Patrick Degeorges
You therefore began to explore a whole range of forms.
Pascal Ferren
Yes, a vast catalogue of forms — by hybridising methods drawn from the social sciences, sociology, geography, psychology, and sensitive approaches to the city and to nature.
For example, Théa Manola’s work on sensory bundles and sensitive scores; eco-psychological approaches⁵, such as those developed by Joanna Macy⁶; or North American traditions of nature education, which place strong emphasis on direct experience of the wild.
I read Joseph Cornell⁷, for instance, who writes manuals of nature experience for children. I love this tradition: scores, protocols, guides for action. Joanna Macy, with Le Conseil de tous les êtres, does not produce a moral theory; she proposes a practice.
That is exactly what interests me: not explaining why we should do things differently, but showing how we can do so.
Patrick Degeorges
Following the Parlement de Loire, you enter another phase: you move from political arts to what might be called arts of mediation. You begin to experiment with new, more situated, more operative forms. This is when you develop dispositifs that are more distinctly your own.
Pascal Ferren
Yes. This period is highly collective. I work in particular with Serge Mang-Joubert and others, and we develop ideas such as a Laboratoire des attachements, or bains de territoire, inspired by Japanese shinrin-yoku: how can a group be led to immerse itself bodily and sensorially in a place, in order to learn how to feel it?
I often use the metaphor of translation. If we want to translate the voices of nature, we must go and meet it. As with a foreign language: to understand Italian, you have to live in Italy, move through different milieus, share meals. The same applies to natural environments. We must pluralise modes of knowledge, rub up against places, navigate between sensitive, scientific, and aesthetic registers, in order to be able to say something about them.
At that point, I work on two very different yet connected questions: how to enter into a sensitive relationship with the interests of nature; and above all, how to transform that experience into speech, language, and communicable forms.
This is where misunderstandings often arise, including with projects such as Lichen. For me, translation is a profoundly human act. We are not trying to make nature speak for itself, but to translate what we understand of it into our language, for our institutions and decision-making bodies. What interests me is not nature without humans, but the ways in which humans can live better with it.
Hence the need to invent administrative forms — concrete receptacles for these relationships and these forms of speech.
Patrick Degeorges
You then identify an instituting dimension: if transformation passes through policies of nature, it requires practices capable of bringing forth political feelings and passions linked to rivers, environments, and their own interests — as in revolutionary moments, when certain realities suddenly become intolerable. You understand that dispositifs are needed to organise this new sensitivity. This is what leads you to work on the Lez.
Pascal Ferren
Yes. Producers based in Montpellier – the Bipolar agency – contacted me in the context of Montpellier 2028. They wanted to work on the Lez, a small coastal river, 30 km long, which runs through the city and supplies around 380,000 people with drinking water. A short river, but with a very high flow rate.
They suggested a “Parliament of the Lez” or a declaration of rights. I proposed another path. In the meantime, I had seen how the Parlement de Loire was often misunderstood — reduced to a new form of citizen participation or to an activist tool for defending nature. But that was not its core issue. What made it singular was its interspecific character. It was not about creating yet another parliament, but about inventing a multispecies politics.
In the case of the Lez, this meant starting from the inhabitants of Montpellier themselves — who have relationships with the river that combine science, affect, poetry, and agency. Some say: “the river decided”, “the river was angry”, “I welcomed it into my home”. This richness needed to be captured.
We then set up a mini-public, a citizens’ conference of 20 to 25 people, who follow a long process of getting to know the river: scientists, divers, water technicians, elected officials, treatment plants, sensory experiences, poetry…
From this, they produce a cahier de recommandations addressed to existing institutions: a litany of “what if…”, of proposals to better do justice to the river. We start from attachments, engage with existing dispositifs (SAGE, CLE, the public water utility), and seek ways to translate these relationships into institutions.
Patrick Degeorges
And this text is embedded in a fiction from the outset.
Pascal Ferren
Yes. In this case, it is the fiction of a river strike. I write a letter addressed to the metropolitan authority, in the name of the Lez, saying: “we no longer understand one another”. The metropolitan authority then mandates Bipolar to negotiate. The group of citizens becomes a negotiation group with the river, and the booklet of recommendations is the outcome of this negotiation.
This brings me to the question of the institution. We cannot live in a state of permanent crisis: we need to aim for durable forms of organisation. Hence the idea of bringing forth new institutional forms.
Patrick Degeorges
Which leads to Mission Relations.
Pascal Ferren
Yes. With Bipolar, we decided to write it as a fictional institution: a kind of public service for relational ecology. Not a utopia, but a paratopia — something that could exist. We imagined its language, its dispositifs, its programmes of action.
For example: spatial planning based on the interests of nature, or consultation processes in which nature itself is represented. From the fiction, we then test these ideas in reality — for instance, by writing the specifications for a public park, integrating interpreters of the living world.
Patrick Degeorges
You thus create a framework for learning and research: the fiction gains reality through feedback and experience.
Pascal Ferren
Exactly. It produces practices and training programmes, such as those we are currently developing with the CNFPT. And I strongly believe in the role of technicians. Innovation largely takes place within the technical spheres of the State and local authorities: in the way a school, a park, a playground is designed; in how heat, water, and living systems are managed.
That is where policies of nature are concretely made.
DISCOVER THE SECOND PART !
¹Stefan Shankland (born in 1967 in Paris) is a visual artist, researcher, and senior lecturer (maître de conférences) at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture (ENSA) in Nantes. His artistic practice explores processes of urban, territorial, industrial, and ecological transformation by integrating art into the dynamics of territorial change. He is notably the initiator of the HQAC approach (Haute Qualité Artistique et Culturelle – High Artistic and Cultural Quality), which he has been developing since 2007 through projects such as TRANS305 — a research-creation programme embedded in the urban transformations of the ZAC du Plateau in Ivry-sur-Seine — and Marbre d’ici, an artistic material created from demolition rubble (winner of the COAL Art & Environment Award 2011). His work combines research, experimental action, teaching, and artistic creation, seeking to turn the long temporalities of transformation into a resource for contemporary culture and the evolving city.
² PEROU Collective (Pôle d’Exploration des Ressources Urbaines), founded in 2012, is an artistic and architectural action-research laboratory that works with situations of precarity in order to highlight gestures of hospitality and propose creative responses to exclusionary policies. The collective combines art, architecture, and collaborative approaches involving researchers, artists, and social actors.
³ Sébastien Thiéry is a political scientist and co-founder of PEROU, an artistic and architectural action-research collective that works with situations of urban precarity in order to highlight gestures of hospitality.
⁴ Camille de Toledo is a Franco-German writer, playwright, and essayist, born in 1976. His work explores themes of memory, identity, history, and social transformation, blending philosophical reflection with fiction. His major publications include Visiter le père (2011), Le Hêtre et le Bouleau (2013), and Millefeuille (2020), which examine contemporary cultural and political dynamics.
⁵ Théa Manola is an architect, urban planner, and researcher whose work focuses on integrating sensoriality and multisensory experience into the understanding and production of urban and landscape spaces. In this context, she has developed and applied innovative methodological tools such as sensory bundles (baluchons sensoriels) — portable devices composed of various media (notebooks, recording devices, objects, etc.) that enable participants to record, explore, and narrate their sensory experiences of a place — as well as commented walks / sensitive scores (parcours commentés / partitions sensibles). These approaches aim to capture individuals’ perceptual, affective, and sensory relationships to their environments, beyond the visual and discursive categories traditionally used in urbanism and design.
⁶ Joanna Macy is an American philosopher and social ecologist, and a pioneer of ecopsychology, a field that explores the links between psychological well-being and human relationships with nature. Her work emphasises the idea that ecological and social crises profoundly affect mental health, and that ecological awareness, practices of care, and collective action can foster both individual and collective transformation. She is particularly known for developing The Work That Reconnects, a framework of participatory practices combining meditation, group dialogue, and ritual to cultivate engagement and resilience in the face of ecological crises.
⁷ Joseph Cornell (1932–2011) was an American educator and environmental pedagogue, and a pioneer in nature education for children. He authored several manuals and activity guides designed to foster observation, curiosity, and ecological sensitivity in children through direct experiences with the natural world, thereby encouraging an emotional and experiential connection to the environment.
