In 2025, as part of the Transformative Territories project, Zone Sensible is hosting artist Stéphanie Sagot for a year-long residency dedicated to exploring our relationships with soil, ecosystems, and the cosmos. Within this framework, Sagot is developing Autel Humus (Humus Altar) — a sculptural, ecological, and ritual device that expands her ongoing research project Terres amoureuses. Conceived as both a functional instrument and a symbolic locus, the work seeks to nurture soil vitality while opening a space for collective imagination, contemplation, and ecological awareness.

Autel Humus operates simultaneously as a composting structure and a ceremonial space, foregrounding soil as a living medium and a site of ongoing metamorphosis. The work honours the many communities—human, vegetal, fungal, and animal—that coexist within the urban farm of Zone Sensible in Saint-Denis. By bringing composting back into view, Sagot reveals the invisible: decomposition, transformation, and the cyclical renewal that underpins all terrestrial life.

The altar functions as a second composting point for the farm, reintegrating waste, nutrients, and matter into daily collective rhythms. It is designed as a place where practical gestures intersect with poetic and symbolic ones, giving form to an ecosophical approach that links soil care, cosmological thinking, ecological responsibility, and collective belonging.

The work emphasises the etymological kinship between humain and humus, recalling their shared Latin root and the deep entanglement between bodies and the earth that nourishes them. Sagot’s rituals, performed around the altar, draw from both agricultural temporalities and ancestral knowledge—gestures rooted in permaculture as well as in long-standing poetic, philosophical, and spiritual traditions. By reconnecting the practice of composting (from composte: “mixed, brought together”) with a broader sense of cosmology and care, the work positions soil life as a living continuum extending from the microscopic to the cosmic.

Crafted in wood and adorned with terracotta ex-votos, the sculpture references nectar-producing plants, bees, and elemental motifs tied to:

• the four elements
• the cardinal directions
• diverse cosmogonies
• cycles of birth, decay, and renewal

Its overall silhouette evokes the Greek letter Omega—a form associated by philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin with the ultimate point of convergence between humanity and the cosmos, indicating a horizon of spiritual and ecological maturation.

Autel Humus also resonates with Parti Poétique’s ongoing Trésor Public project, particularly through its relation to bees and honey. The altar includes a place for beeswax candles, whose colours reflect the nectars gathered by local bees, linking soil, plant, pollinator, and human in an unbroken chain of ecological exchanges.

Through this multifaceted device, Sagot re-situates humus not merely as organic matter, but as a relational, symbolic, and cosmological reality—a living altar to the fertile ground from which life emerges, transforms, and returns.

Throughout the residency, several workshops have enabled communities—children, elders, gardeners, and visitors—to participate in the creative and ecological processes underlying Autel Humus.

Workshop 1 — January 2025: Exploring the Life of the Soil

In the first workshop, Sagot invited children aged 7 to 9 to explore the living soil of Zone Sensible. Together they created a “sensitive survey”, a playful demographic census of the soil’s inhabitants. Through touch, observation, and imagination, participants encountered the marvellous diversity of underground life: plant, animal, fungal, and even mineral presences.

Workshop 2 — February 2025: Willow Cutting and Propagation

The second workshop brought together children and retired women for a willow cutting and propagation session, developed in relation to Parti Poétique’s République Forestière project. This shared activity strengthened intergenerational links while contributing to the ecological dynamics of the site.

Workshops — 17 May 2025: Preparing the Ground for Autel Humus

A collective gardening workshop was held to prepare the site where Autel Humus will be installed. Participants:

• marked out the installation zone with string and wooden stakes,
• prepared the soil,
• planted seeds of nectar-producing (melliferous) plants.

After the planting, Sagot read a text and led a meditative performance, grounding the gesture of preparation in a shared ritual of attention, care, and anticipation.

Through Autel Humus, Stéphanie Sagot deepens Zone Sensible’s mission to explore the interdependencies between soil, ecosystems, and human cultures. By blending artistic creation, ecological action, and symbolic practice, the work becomes a space for imagining how communities can reconnect with the ground that sustains them. It is both a functional ecological structure and a poetic device—an altar dedicated to humus, to transformation, and to the continuity of life.

More details on Zone Sensible Web site