Paysage sans paysan (Gilles Clément / Yannick Ogor)

Today, there is a widespread interest in agricultural (or horticultural) experiments in urban areas: collective gardens, attempts at self-management, mobile vegetable gardens, plots delimited by reclaimed pallets, occupation of wasteland, revitalization of neighbourhoods around urban farms, management by local communities, sharing economy, contact with old practices, forgotten vegetables, protected species, etc. One can only be seduced by what appears first in its alternative dimension (in its ecological and political alternative dimension): another form of exchange, another relationship with plant life, another modality of the collective - which transform everyday life.

Based on this observation, we would like to propose a reading of the works and ideas developed by the landscape architect (also an artist) Gilles Clément - whose interest and success seem a priori linked to the extension of these experiences in cities. Clément raises an important question: what relationship to the environment can we still build/imagine, it being understood that it is now untenable - in a situation of anthropocene, that is to say: in a situation of resource depletion and irreversible negative impact on the environment - to continue to engage in a relationship of strict and shameless exploitation of nature, but that we cannot be satisfied with ecological purism and the solution of building reserves, enclosures or islets where diversity would in some way be preserved. In several of his texts (Manifeste du Tiers-paysage, L’alternative ambiante, Toujours la vie invente, Où en est l’herbe ?, etc.), Gilles Clément shows that nature resists both its exploitation and its "preservation", as it is dynamic/moving and inventive: it finds its best land not in the countryside or in parks but in what he calls the third landscape: on urban neglected areas, those places where human activity is not non-existent but where it is apparently suspended (motorway curbs, railway sidelines, abandoned former industrial land, slag heaps, forest edges, steep slopes, river banks, etc.)). So places that are not (or no longer) maintained (even if they border the traces of human activity), and which become very precious refuges for biodiversity (botany, entomology, etc.). Cities therefore clearly play a very important role - in Clément's case - in the construction of his theory of the abandoned (a theory to which we would like to give another dimension in our conclusion).

Gilles Clément therefore advocates in his texts inspiring ideas that appeal to the greatest number of people (including those who, like us, hear nothing about gardening): respect for the rhythm / cadence specific to plants, minimizing the constraints placed on their free growth, legitimizing their circulation within what he calls "the planetary garden", the "non-commercial" use of biodiversity, etc. These ideas have now come a long way and have begun to integrate massively with current urban plans (each city is deploying its own small wasteland). But that is not exactly what interests us about him, or not only, and we would like to propose a different - slightly offbeat - reading of his ecological reflection. For us: by developing his ideas on the Third Landscape, by proposing an inventory of what he identifies as "involuntary art" forms, or by bringing a new conception of gardening, Clément puts the peasant question at the heart of environmental issues, i.e. makes it possible to think about ecological problems from the perspective of the peasant (or rather from the perspective of his disappearance). It allows this link despite the fact that it does not speak, or very little, of the peasant, but rather of the artist, the gardener, the gardener-artist. And we would like to explain here why we consider this operation to be decisive, and perhaps even urgent.