Caroline Le Méhauté & Isabella Soupart

Caroline Le Méhauté & Isabella Soupart
Tellus Project
Installation & dance
10.04 > 24.08.2025

Visual artist Caroline Le Méhauté and choreographer Isabella Soupart present Tellus Project, an installation-performance at the crossroads of art and biology, or bio-art. Bio-art is a contemporary art movement that uses the plastic resources offered by biotechnology as a medium. The project invites us to rethink our relationship with the living and to question our practices through art. Taking the earth beneath our feet as their starting point, the artists draw on the fact that 75% of our planet’s soil is now polluted. United by their shared concern for the environment and for materials, the duo is setting up in Centrale and is collaborating with a special material, polluted excavated earth.

Tellus Project is a research project initiated by Caroline le Méhauté. Based on this overwhelming observation, she is directing her research towards other practices. Phytoremediation is a gentle, slow method of helping to remedy this pollution. It involves the absorption of pollutants from the soil by hyper-accumulative plants, which are capable of filtering and degrading some of the pollutants. As well as being a symbolic and poetic act, creation can play a part in ‘care’, in building resilience in the living world.

In Tellus Project, choreographer Isabella Soupart invites a group of dancers to take turns in a physical, rhythmic and spellbinding test of endurance, interacting individually or collectively as they confront the polluted earth that can no longer be ‘hidden’: piles of earth are shaped, transformed, moved and sculpted in turn. The audience is invited to share in this unique and hypnotic experience, individually defining their own time dedicated to this performance. Tellus Project is a dazzling choreography of bodies and sculptures/installations, endlessly reconfigured.

Dancers : Elsa Tagawa, Marita Schwanke

Negociation 161 – Dear ground
2025
Contaminated excavated soil, water, phytoremediating plants, wood, fabric, horticultural lamps
Installation & dance
Installation activated on 09.04 by Caroline Le Méhauté and dancer Elsa Tagawa
& on 17.04 at 7pm and 8.30pm by dancer Elsa Tagawa

Negociation 162 – Hidden
2025
Excavated soil
Installation & dance
Installation activated on 16.05 at 1pm and 7pm by dancers Marita Schwanke
& on 24.05 at 4pm by dancers Marita Schwanke

Negociation 163 – Her skin
2025
Excavated soil
Installation & dance
Installation activated on 22.06 at 4pm by dancers Marita Schwanke