This conversation between Suzanne Husky and Patrick Degeorges takes place within the framework of Transformative Territories.
Suzanne Husky is an artist whose work focuses on river regeneration, beavers, and low-tech ecological restoration. Over the past years, her practice has increasingly shifted from representation to direct territorial action, leading to the creation of the Alliance for the Beaver People and Living Rivers, a hybrid structure operating at the intersection of art, environmental science, activism, and public policy. Through this alliance, Husky works with river authorities, scientists, institutions and local inhabitants to restore degraded watersheds by activating natural processes rather than imposing engineered solutions.
Their exchange explores how ecological regeneration can be understood as a form of social and territorial sculpture: a process-based practice in which artists work not by controlling outcomes, but by setting conditions for living systems — human and non-human — to co-evolve. The dialogue addresses questions of institutional friction, long-term commitment, alliances, public engagement, and the politics of place, as well as the growing tension between bureaucratic governance and locally rooted ecological care.
Rather than presenting a model to be replicated, this conversation documents a situated practice grounded in the Landes and the Charente regions of south-west France. It shows how artistic work can emerge from deep territorial attachment, and how transformation, in this context, is less a matter of design than of sustained attention, negotiation, and trust in living processes.
Patrick Degeorges
Let’s begin this conversation with a deliberately open question — one you can take in whatever direction you wish. What led you to commit yourself to an artistic practice?
Suzanne Husky
I more or less grew up in it. My father was a musician and my mother a painter, and I was the eldest child. Art was never really a question. I first studied philosophy, which I loved, but I wasn’t particularly good at academic philosophy, so I transferred to art school, which felt like a more natural environment for me.
What truly shaped my artistic trajectory, however, was completing my studies in the United States after beginning them in France. In the 2000s in the US, all the political questions that art could engage with were already being taught and explored — environmental art, gender studies, African-American film history. None of this was marginal. In France, at the time, there was still a great deal of hesitation about addressing political issues through art. In the US, I felt authorised to pursue what I was already inclined towards.
Patrick Degeorges
So from the outset, your practice was politically engaged.
Suzanne Husky
Yes, very much so. One of the first things I did in California was to document a protest in Oakland against environmental racism. There was a chemical yeast factory located in the middle of an African-American neighbourhood. At that time, I had never even heard the term “environmental racism” in France.
Patrick Degeorges
So ecological and political commitment were never separate in your work.
Suzanne Husky
Not at all. I had already become vegetarian as a teenager. When I was in Germany, I took part in a camp near Hamburg where we were removing invasive species to protect historic dunes. That’s where I encountered vegan and vegetarian activist cultures, and it confirmed a way of living that was already emerging for me.
Patrick Degeorges
Looking back now, how do you understand the link between art and ecological engagement in your work? Was it always about trying to make a difference in how people live together?
Suzanne Husky
There was a moment when all of this became much more explicit for me. It was in the early 2000s, after 9/11 and during the Iraq war. In the US there was a violent backlash against environmental and activist movements. A book had just come out, Green Is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement Under Siege by Will Potter, which described how environmentalists were being treated as terrorists.
People involved in organisations like Food Not Bombs — who were simply feeding people in need — were being arrested. Campaigners against deforestation were being labelled “eco-terrorists”. Even now, in US prisons, a large number of people incarcerated under terrorism laws are what the state calls “eco-terrorists”: people who took actions against corporations, sometimes as minimal as throwing eggs at pharmaceutical companies that test on monkeys. Because these actions damaged corporate value or reputation, they were treated as terrorism.
In that context, I decided to document everyday forms of urban resistance — people ripping out their lawns, replanting native species, creating wildlife corridors. This was between 2001 and 2007. At the time there was almost no media attention for these practices. Today someone who grows drought-resistant tomatoes becomes a media star, but back then it was a very austere, oppressive period under the Bush administration. Making these gestures visible felt essential.
Patrick Degeorges
How did you do that, practically?
Suzanne Husky
Through exhibitions, essentially — that was my only megaphone. I was young and had no money, but I was lucky enough to be exhibiting. I showed photographs, drawings, diagrams of living roofs and grey-water filtration systems, and I included stories. For instance: how do you keep a goat in the city? How do you organise with neighbours? How do you collect and filter your own urine in an urban environment? There were also small publications. It was a very hybrid practice.
Patrick Degeorges
What did this change for you? Did it lead to new relationships, new ways of working?
Suzanne Husky
It took a very long time. Things accumulated slowly, layer by layer, like compost. One exhibition led to another, one encounter informed the next. At the same time, I trained as a landscape gardener and worked in that field to earn a living. That physical, material relationship with soil was crucial.
Now, when I am invited to do an exhibition, I insist that something concrete happens on the ground. I can say: if there is no real intervention — no living process, no site-based transformation — then I am not interested. A white cube full of images is not enough for me anymore. It took years for me to understand that this was what I truly needed to demand.
Patrick Degeorges
Can you give some examples of how this took shape?
Suzanne Husky
One early project was Sleeper Cells (2010), in a high-profile urban permaculture garden. I created sculptural works and also set up a seed library — a real library system, where people could borrow seeds of local species and were expected to return seeds later. It required working with the city, with permaculture groups, with institutions. It made everything very tangible, but also very complex.
Another important moment was my exhibition with COAL at Chamarande in 2012–2013. At first I proposed sculptures, but what I really wanted was to create a garden for pollinators and birds. The team agreed. We worked with the site’s gardeners and botanist to create what we called a “wild French garden” — a space designed not just for humans but for other living beings. It was beautiful. Unfortunately, invasive species later led to the whole thing being destroyed. A short-lived success, and a failure.
More recently, with Stéphanie Sagot in Le Nouveau Ministère de l’Agriculture, we worked at the Timișoara Biennial. We created a forest garden next to the art space and wrote the Manifesto for an Agriculture of Love. We worked with municipal gardeners who are normally forced to do nothing but sterile maintenance — roundabouts, lawns, cutting. We asked them to let the soil regenerate, to amend it with manure for six months, then stop touching it. They loved it. A citizen group took over.
Then the project collapsed. Even though €15,000 had been raised for its maintenance, a new director hired someone with no knowledge of living soils or agroecology, and the funds were effectively wasted. The project died through institutional ignorance.
Patrick Degeorges
An ignorance not just of agroecology, but of the social and ecological ecosystem you were building — a place for encounters, shared care, hospitality, new ways of being together.
Suzanne Husky
Exactly. And what is tragic is that the director arrived with precisely that rhetoric — saying she wanted to “take care of relationships” and “revitalise connections” — while erasing everything that had been built before.
Patrick Degeorges
You were describing the Timișoara project earlier, and I find that moment particularly revealing. In what we sometimes call transformative artistic practices — even if the term is imperfect — institutional logics are very often where things become blocked. It is frequently institutions that create fatal short-circuits.
Suzanne Husky
Yes — that is absolutely the core of the issue. At the Timișoara Biennial, I worked with an outstanding curator, Kasia Redzisz, who now directs Kanal – Centre Pompidou in Belgium. When she arrived from England, we immediately started pushing things. I proposed that the artwork should consist almost entirely of soil regeneration. That soil work would be the piece.
We were dealing with compacted urban soil, previously built over, extremely degraded. We amended it, again and again, before eventually planting. The planting was almost just the final stage, the surface. What really mattered was what was happening underground: the life of the soil itself.
I couldn’t go because of COVID, but I saw the images and I was deeply moved. I was proud that this approach had been carried through. Timișoara is in Romania, which I later realised had once been one of Europe’s grain baskets. Today it is a kind of frontier territory — a Wild West — where Dutch and German agribusinesses buy land to produce cheaply and export back home.
Patrick Degeorges
Given that context, how did the public engage with this work? How did it resonate with those extractivist, productivist logics that dominate the region?
Suzanne Husky
That is a difficult question because, strangely, I was never physically there. The whole project was carried by a team of landscape designers and mediators on site. I only had access to images and reports. It was an odd experience to work remotely like that.
But what I do know is that projects like this excite me infinitely more than producing dozens of drawings of beavers. Not that drawing is unimportant — I later worked extensively on beavers — but here there is something concrete, something that actually changes material conditions.
That said, my drawings are not decorative. They are tools. I make explanatory drawings, and technicians ask for permission to use them in their presentations. That tells me they are doing real work in the world.
Today, alongside my artistic practice, we have created an association called The Alliance for the Beaver People and Living Rivers. It has become a fully-fledged environmental organisation, with a scientific committee. My time is now split between my art and this non-profit association, which is absolutely central to my life.
But this puts me on a very narrow ridge. On one side, there is my artistic practice; on the other, highly operational territorial action. Concretely, we support low-tech river regeneration. We work with river authorities, mixed syndicates, Nature Conservatories, and water managers to implement these tools. But in France, you cannot even put a stick into a river without enormous administrative procedures: DDTM files, validation by the Office Français de la Biodiveristé (OFB), landowner permissions. It is a massive bureaucratic machine.
Fundraising takes a colossal amount of time. Yet ironically, my only income comes from the art world — which I barely have time for anymore. So I am caught in a paradox: huge momentum on the ground, but almost no financial support.
And honestly, the joy of restoring rivers — both for the humans who do it and for the non-human beings — is incomparable to the satisfaction of exhibiting.
Patrick Degeorges
Do you still draw? And isn’t there a hope that exhibitions and drawings might lead people to engage with river restoration?
Suzanne Husky
Yes, and we are thinking about this very seriously now. This year we received funding from the Carasso Foundation and from ÉRABLE, Raconter le vivant pour agir. This allowed us to set up a scientific committee, with leading experts who are developing monitoring protocols for this new way of restoring rivers. That is crucial: without protocols, nothing moves.
I come from south-west France, a region with incised rivers where beaver has been gone for a long time. So I wanted to focus attention there. We are now trying to visualise what the Rhône would look like if it were restored, because there is a huge lack of imagination about regeneration. GEstion des Milieux Aquatiques et la Prévention des Inondations (GEMAPI) services need to be able to explain what they are going to do. My images can help make future processes visible: help see how the river might change over time.
In Charente-Maritime, we are working with some of the most polluted rivers in France, probably due to intense pesticide use. Water services there are isolated: nobody sees their work; maybe because we have used rivers to evacuate water for so long, we forgot them, we forgot they are a wildlife corridor and “the veins of the land “. So there is a real need to connect these invisible processes to public understanding.
We also work with anti–mega-basin movements, Stop Bassines, FRAC Angoulême, the Martell Foundation (cognac producers), landowners, and water authorities. These alliances are emerging in the Charente region and in the Landes de Gascogne. They allow us to act both on the land and in the realm of narrative: exhibitions, animations, drawings.
Patrick Degeorges
That leads to the question of collectives and alliances. Can one artist really do all this alone? And how do you build counter-evaluation — new ways of measuring what matters?
Suzanne Husky
Alliance is in the name of our association. It refers first to our alliance with beavers, and to a refusal of the language of “ecosystem services”. We do not want to collaborate with industrial forestry, but with institutions like the Office National des Forets (ONF) when they rethink forest management for the living.
There are many layers of partnership. FRAC Poitou-Charentes carries the administration and acts as an orchestrator, which relieves me enormously. Within the association, we have four co-presidents. In the South-West, we work constantly, exchanging…
Patrick Degeorges
And the collective dimension?
Suzanne Husky
I sometimes say a hydrologist could replace me. But I am not sure that is true. This is not only about hydrology; it is about changing how we perceive the world and how we cooperate. Art creates spaces where people can enter gently into new shared experiences.
My closest collaborator is a sensitive logger who spent ten years at Notre-Dame-des-Landes. Like me, he has never had a stable salary. We work endlessly because we believe in this. Others in our group include a dancer and a Beaux-Arts graduate who handles communication. These are not careers — they are positions, postures.
Patrick Degeorges
And how do you evaluate what changes?
Suzanne Husky
A good example is a Nouveaux commanditaires project in the Nièvre. What started as a pedestrian trail became a regional training programme for all river technicians, hosted in an agricultural college. The commissioners track cultural change: people discovered beavers, technicians are being trained, citizens are engaged.
They inventory these shifts. Not just outputs, but changes in perception, relationships, and shared knowledge. That is a form of counter-evaluation.
Often, people still ask me what drawings I will produce, even after I have written and designed an entire future through a project proposal. That tension forces me to articulate this way of working as an artistic practice in its own right. Some institutions, like the Landes de Gascogne Park, understand this very well and are able to put it into words.
Patrick Degeorges
When I talk with others involved in Érable — Pascal Ferren, for example, who worked on the project Parlement de la Loire and continues today through his idea of institutional fiction — he often refers to social sculpture. When you say “I wrote the future”, you are, in a way, practising social sculpture: an artistic work that transforms territory and society. How do you feel about that reference?
Suzanne Husky
That resonates strongly. One of my teachers in the United States was Suzanne Lacy. She created large-scale social sculptures, such as The Oakland Projects, where hundreds of children from deprived neighbourhoods were brought together with hundreds of police officers. These encounters were carefully structured around tables and filmed from helicopters. Seen from above, they literally formed a sculpture.
But more importantly, it was the first time police officers had ever agreed to sit down with these children to have real conversations. Lacy worked on what she called “difficult conversations”. I myself worked with her on projects involving incarcerated children. She was a Trojan horse within the art world, but always through highly structured, formalised processes.
I do not know the French context well enough to say how deeply these ideas of social sculpture were absorbed here. But I do feel that something of that legacy has circulated.
Patrick Degeorges
What interests me in that notion is that it is not about objects, but about forms that produce effects across many registers. When Thierry Boutonnier plants trees, people ask: “How is that art?” But it is art because a form has been deliberately activated, a form that generates consequences in space, time, ecology, and society.
That is also what we are trying to identify in transformative artistic practices: a form that is not a figure but a process. You shape something that only becomes visible over time, often retrospectively. It is like planting: the form unfolds in time.
So my question is: how does such a form emerge in Érable? Pascal Ferren’s trial in Ussel was his form. What was yours?
Suzanne Husky
This connects very directly to how river restoration works. Renaturation means activating natural processes rather than imposing a form in a specific location. You never know exactly where the water will go, which plants will grow, how the river will respond. You work with living processes.
That is also how we think about our association. Like the wood placed in a river, which becomes buried under sediment and raises the water level, our association is designed to disappear into the process. Once the living systems and the institutions have integrated these practices, we will no longer be needed.
Form and process are inseparable. In Érable, for instance, I directed funding towards a filmmaker, a writer, and others. Baptiste Morizot will write a text that does not fit academic formats anymore. That creates tension, because institutions expect a scientific publication. But we try to push them to accept that the publication must live elsewhere, where it can resonate, instead of becoming another unread volume on a shelf.
Patrick Degeorges
So you are not producing fixed forms, but enabling emergent ones. You sculpt by following the grain of the wood, like a river follows its bed.
That leads to the question of the commission itself: how can commissions evolve so that they can host and support this kind of transformative process?
Suzanne Husky
Érable was unusual in that respect. Each time I am invited into an exhibition context, I try to shift the frame toward these process-based forms. In a world dominated by dystopian narratives, I feel authorised to propose other imaginaries.
Even institutions like the Forêt de l’Art Contemporain in the Landes — which normally display monumental sculptures in the forest — agreed when I proposed regenerating four kilometres of river instead. When you push in the direction you believe in, there is often a surprising attraction.
The FRAC Poitou-Charentes is another example. I told them: “You have mega-basins and the most polluted rivers in France — let me work with you.” They said yes. Compared with the rigidity of environmental administrations, the art world still allows the lines to move.
Patrick Degeorges
What we are really describing is a different philosophy of action: not knowing in advance what the result will be, trusting living processes, learning as we go. This is radically opposed to the technocratic model, which assumes it already knows the solution.
This implies reinventing the idea of a commission: one that accepts uncertainty, includes non-experts, and works through care rather than control. Is that something you have managed to do beyond the cultural field?
Suzanne Husky
There is still a lot of constraint. Before we can place a single piece of wood in a river, there are nine months of paperwork, meetings, and permits. That cannot be avoided. The freedom is not in the administration, but in the thinking and in the mediation.
Patrick Degeorges
We are also thinking about new kinds of multi-sector commissions — projects that would include culture, agriculture, biodiversity, and social issues together, over decades rather than years. What would you suggest?
Suzanne Husky
For me, geography is fundamental. I work in the Charente and the Landes because they are my territories. My family is from there. These rivers matter to me. I will work there for the rest of my life.
Clément, one of the co-president, is the same. We invest where we live, because that is where the damage is and where we are accountable. Territorial attachment is the engine of long-term commitment.
Patrick Degeorges
So the commission does not come from the DRAC, but from your forest, your rivers, your neighbours.
Suzanne Husky
When you live somewhere, you know the diplomacy required. You cannot just arrive with a funded project and ignore the hunters, the farmers, the conflicts.
We work with river managers who are committed.
Patrick Degeorges
Public engagement, then, is not about reaching people, but about helping them take hold of what already concerns them — their water, their land, their living conditions.
Suzanne Husky
Exactly.
Patrick Degeorges
This connects to a much broader political shift: the generalisation of states of exception, where decisions about “public interest” are increasingly concentrated in the hands of prefects. This short-circuits local alliances and democratic capacities.
What you are doing is not just art; it is a reconfiguration of how society responds to questions of habitability. These issues are now everywhere, at our doorsteps.
One last question: do the people you train learn to perceive what the beaver does to the river in a sensitive way?
Suzanne Husky
Sometimes. Some folks get it and it changes their lives, some folks don’t.
Patrick Degeorges
But they can then transmit that experience?
Suzanne Husky
Yes. There are levels of difficulty in process based restoration. That is why we are all still learning.
Patrick Degeorges
Thank you, truly, for everything you have shared.
