My artistic work straddles the boundary between two mutually reinforcing practices: intervention in the public space and shaping objects in my studio. The first gives my work a social and collective dimension, while my manual work is more fragile and intimate.

Since the early 2000s, I've been part of the movement to take art out of institutions. I exhibit outdoors and am interested in the complex relationships we have with our environment. I'm developing a reflection on our ambivalence, caused by the real desire we all have to get back to nature's roots, and the ever-growing fantasies of a technological future. In our desire to dominate nature, we seem to have lost control of it. My installations and sculptures bring together opposing elements, reflecting the tension born of these contradictions. My interventions are anomalies that find their place to the point of merging with their environment. The hybrid nature I produce describes a landscape in full mutation, at the frontier of reality.

For some years now, I've been intensifying my reflections on the excesses of technology through the artisanal prism of ceramics. With ceramics, I explore a more immediate scale. I use earthenware, stoneware and porcelain, as well as their various glazes, to achieve very different results, sometimes rough or, on the contrary, extremely delicate and fragile. The technical mastery I have acquired enables me to create objects of great realism and to play, as in my outdoor installations, with the boundaries of reality.

I invent a world in which graffiti is made of geraniums, stump fungus grows on plastic garden furniture until it absorbs it, weeds are disciplined and form formal gardens, or garbage is made of gold-gloss porcelain, fragile and precious. A world in which whimsical nature overflows and undesirables - graffiti, weeds, garbage and the like - become the real stars. An everyday life at once banal and enchanted, where our own internal contradictions are expressed in the face of a suffocating ecological crisis.

Thomas Maillet Mezeray

École Normale Supérieure - Philosophy Department / 2022

The undergrowth is that singular plant space, intermediate between the ground and the canopy, where three forest strata come together: the shrub stratum, the muscular stratum and the herbaceous stratum. A crucible of biodiversity, it is the antithesis of the concrete homogeneity of the city. Yet it is this strange association that Aurélie Slonina explores in this installation presented on the occasion of the “Urbanité verte” exhibition at the Centre Tignous d'Art contemporain. The herbaceous layer has been replaced by a layer of bitumen. The shrubs have been replaced by heterogeneous objects, among which we recognize several terms from the artist's language: the air freshener in Fraîcheur marine (2009) and Fraîcheur végétale (2012); the shoes in Sunrise (2015), in particular the sneakers found as compositional elements in Green touch (2014) and Hors-sol (2020). Significant artifacts: aren't they witnesses to a society that distances man from nature - a nature considered dirty and whose odors should be masked? As a counterpoint, mushrooms represent the only form of life. Organisms that are still a mystery to the natural sciences, neither animals nor plants, they thwart the botanical taxons that Aurélie Slonina likes to subvert. So it's no coincidence that they feature repeatedly in his compositions: Hepatica fistulina #1 (2010), Hepatica fistulina #2 (2010), Big bang (2012). Compositions in which they are endowed with an ambiguous symbolic value: parasites feeding on their host, they also fulfill a crucial ecological function by degrading matter. In Sous-bois, this latter value seems more accentuated. A force for regeneration, they swarm over synthetic waste, giving rise to the hope of reclaiming nature. The central pile of gravel adds to the equivocation. Is it a tumulus, a funereal tribute to a nature smothered under tarmac? Or is it the sign of vegetation about to break through the asphalt and reclaim its rights? The presence of objects that have become garbage raises the question of time. This theme is not new to the artist's work: La Dérive des météores (2020) expressed “a disturbing futuristic vision”. With Sous-bois, it's a certain relationship with the past, perhaps a nostalgic one, that shines through. Are the gold-strapped pumps and sandals reminders of the festive evenings of a youth long gone? And the piece of crown, a fragment of childhood resurfacing? Whatever the questions raised and interpretations sketched out, the hybridity of this installation makes it a matrix of ideas questioning our relationship with ourselves and our environment.

Léa Bismuth

Author, art critic, and curator / 2021

Creating Openings Aurélie Slonina

Though our experience of art forms cannot be dissociated from our perception of time, certain serendipitous encounters may in fact enable us to approach speci"c works with greater acuity. Haven’t we all seen, in recent months 1, those plant forms, commonly said to be weedy and invasive, that have cropped up in the interstices of our city sidewalks, roads, and walls? Hardy, robust species, but green even so, with leaves often spikey and corrugated, and stems long and proud? Haven’t we all posted cellphone pictures on social media of baby birds on a windowsill, of the "rst $owers of spring, or of subversive plants that, for want of a proper $ower box, have prevailed over the tenets of domestication? A similar shift occurs in Replicant (2017), an irreverent and whimsical play on norms subverting the codes of language, when the plants of a formal $ower bed after a design from the gardens of Versailles – heir to the landscape classicism of André Le Nôtre – are replaced by dandelions, thistle, and stinging nettles.

There’s no such thing as weeds

But what does the term “weed” actually mean? After a quick search on Internet, I "nd out we often use it mistakenly: a weed in one context is not necessarily a weed in another. Let’s just say that, as it is with many things, it’s all a matter of how you look at it. Take, for example, the dandelion, an edible plant that attracts pollinators, and that is therefore bene"- cial in terms of biodiversity. 2 So, why do we need words like “weeds” in the "rst place – those literal “bad plants” in French (mauvaises herbes) – and what exactly is it we are trying to weed out? For language is a sneaky thing, and it is expressions like these that have pigeonholed for good certain plant forms – and given us leave to use “weedkiller” with a clear conscious. For ultimately, it is the invasive and expansionist nature of these archaic plants that we dread. Gardeners in favor of mastering and control were no doubt terri"ed from the outset by these irrepressible and proli"c species.3 This point, in particular, reveals the aspect of social commitment inherent to all of Aurélie Slonina’s work, the notion of “weed” here taking on sociological resonance by its con$ation with what our conformity-happy society calls “undesirables” : those populations either banished to the suburbs (the term banlieue in French derives from ban, the royal prerogative to rule and command), or expelled beyond our national borders.

Early on – starting with the Age of Reason, as Foucault tells us – madness too was banished, locked up in asylums designed for that purpose. So, it is reasonable to guess that the French idiom for weed, herbe folle, literally “crazy grass,” or wild grass, dates from that same period. According to the dictionary, its propensity to “grow anywhere,” “haphazardly” and without the “control of man” earned it the quali"cation. But imagine the contrary, grass that doesn’t run wild, that could be termed “normal,” that grows only on command. What a bore! Other works by Aurélie Slonina explore similar questions. Take, for example, Fluorescence (2017), a series of stencils of imaginary, $uorescent green weeds painted on city walls, in a nod to the spontaneous nature of street art. Likewise, in her transient installation, Friche à la française (2009-2102), the plans of the French landscape architect André Le Nôtre, with their perfect curvilinear lines and scrolls, become a playground for the propagation of “rampant” plant species. The work of the French garden designer Gilles Clément comes to mind, with his concept of the “garden in movement” (le jardin en movement), an ecosystem inspired by vacant lots, where “all plant species can develop freely.” 4 Consequently, it is a question of “conserving the species that have adapted to an environment,” of cooperating with them according to the unique capacity of each to propagate at will. Clément also developed the theory of the “planetary garden,” a life-a&rming call for ecological diversity exploring the political stakes of the garden as a “place of possible invention.” 5 Slonina’s work could therefore be seen as a transposition of what Clément calls the “third-landscape” into urban environments. In one of her recent experiments, notably in the context of her installation Guests, she worked with tarpaulin, the material used by migrants to build makeshift shelters. But “environmental questions aside, the notion of ‘undesirable’ is also a possible metaphor for a social reality,” the artist explains.

Drifting Meteors against an SF backdrop

Slonina’s work also ventures into territories of critical and cosmic conjecture. From the concrete planters of our city sidewalks to SF fantasies of meteors falling from the sky, she took the plunge with her exhibition, Drifting Meteors (2020), at the Maréchalerie Contemporary Art Center in Versailles. In a space immersed in darkness, the spectator discovers an immersive installation of dimly lit blocks of faceted, grey cement hovering miraculously in the air. The “diamond” design of the sculptural objects was inspired by the cement planters characteristic of 1960s urban planning. But nothing is growing in this case, excepting perhaps the visions of future worlds cropping up in our minds. These “unidenti"ed $ying objects crashed to Earth,” the artist tells us. And our perception is abruptly plunged into a disturbing but plausible parallel reality. Next we notice a life form, or what might be called a “human witness:” the small "gure, about the size of a "ve-year-old child, is perfectly still; his name is Hors-Sol (without land), after the French term for hydroponic growing methods; he is wearing the typical getup of a contemporary city dweller – hoodie, jeans, and sneakers – but he doesn’t appear to see us. His face is hidden, in fact, by a virtual reality headset, which naturally leads us to wonder whether the scene isn’t a mere "gment of his imagination. Could the "gure be some diminutive demiurge of legend, could we be guests lost in a virtual landscape of his making? Hors-Sol is fashioned out of ceramic, he is green like chlorophyl-laden leaves, and he is elsewhere – caught between di%erent realities and times.

A confusion hovers over all these disparate forms, which are neither entirely natural nor completely arti"cial. The artist speaks readily about vistas, about what she calls “creating openings,” in reference to her video Openings (2020), a dizzying montage alternating photographs taken between the outskirts of Paris and a Californian desert. It is interesting to note that the term “vista” also signi"es a distant view or prospect seen through an opening. In other words, the eye takes in a vista, or perceives an opening, the way the beholder – whether plant or animal – takes in air. So, let’s take a gamble on a great gulp of air, to catch our breath at last in this world in need of desperate repair.

Frédéric Keck

Research director at the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale

CNRS - Collège de France - EHESS / 2022

That Which Filters Through: Nature, Invasive Species, and Modernity in the Art of Aurélie Slonina

Why is it that we are seized with a sense of vertigo when we look at Drifting Meteors? Why are our certainties shaken? Upon entering the Maréchalerie Contemporary Art Center, we discover a series of concrete blocks, some hovering miraculously in the air, others thrust solidly into the ground, as if by arbitrary design. A small, green ceramic "gure catches our eye. We place ourselves in the "gure’s line of vision and what had looked like an alien invasion turns into a series of empty planters attesting to an obliterated landscape. In the eye of the green "gure, who resembles both an invader and a gardener, these ruins from a bygone world seem to take on new life – but doesn’t it always take the gaze of a stranger to organize the set of appearances that we call “nature?” In the adjoining room, we can watch a "lm, projected no doubt via the "gure’s virtual reality headset. More planters, but this time "lled with urban greenery, make way for formal gardens, and then tra&c circles planted with colorful $owers, and the cacti and palms of a Californian desert. The camera moves around a tree and then cuts to a point-of-view shot of the landscape, captured as it were from the vegetation’s perspective. It is this ever-shifting play on perspective that has thrown o% our sense of balance. Are we looking at the surroundings from a mountainside, or from the branch of a tree? Are we immersed in the reality of a world in ruins, or in the gardener’s vision of a possible world to come?

Lessons from contemporary anthropology, in response to ecological disasters, have shaken established categories of scienti"c thought.1 Human reason, since the Enlightenment in the 18th century, has imposed a set form on the phenomenal world – to the point of engul"ng it in pure abstractions, as the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant teaches us.2 The anthropological divide separating nature and culture, and around which societal classi"cations are organized, emerged from this original separation of subject from object, with the demarcation in every human community that distinguishes urban and natural attributes adding to the gap. Today, the organizational proclivities at the heart of critical modernity and Kantian aesthetics are being called into question by the unprecedented proliferation of invasive species in the context of climate change. However, since the possibility itself of producing a work, or of making di%erences visible, appears to be tied to the guiding principle of subjectivity as an organizing force, the question is – how are we to understand nature today, with the modern organization of the natural world being challenged by invasive species? This could be the question central to all of Aurélie Slonina’s work.

By exploring issues of invasive plants, her artwork reformulates the critical question that ushered in modernity: how far back do we need to stand to be able to perceive reality? In the context of globalization, “good plants” become “bad,” i.e. weeds – what the French call mauvaises herbes – when they cross into non-native ecosystems. But botany doesn’t make distinctions between “good” and “bad.” The arrival of a species in an ecosystem is merely an opportunity for further symbioses.3 Slonina uses the word “in"ltrator” to describe such organisms, an allusion to the "lters, fences, and borders that need to be negotiated to successfully adapt to a new environment. But though invasive species are subject to mandatory processes of "ltration prior to being accepted, "lters – when seen from the perspective of those who pass through them and not from the viewpoint of those who produce them – can be made into works of art.

In Friches à la française, dandelions, brambles, and nettle have been planted after the formal garden plans of the French landscape architect, André Le Nôtre, revealing their natural inclination to gradually and quietly transgress the imposed con"gurations of the French formal garden. In Treillis, a latticework is shaped into what appears to be an electromagnetic "eld with multiple focal points, suggesting that the classic garden framework of mandatory perspectives would be unable to withstand the presence of unwanted creepers. As for the blue tarpaulins of Guests, which have sprung up in the courtyard of a building in Paris, they remind us of those other tarps, planted by migrants, that have sprung up in the parks and suburbs of cities across Europe. And then there is “Line up,” subjecting us to what Temple Grandin imagines the animal sees and feels as it enters the slaughterhouse;4 in this case, however, the experience is that of the plants being mowed down by a tractor – and that reconstitute, willy-nilly, a modernday garden à la française.

And so, Aurélie Slonina, like the street artist Invader, confronts the limits of imposed urban frameworks by introducing visual elements relegated to the sidelines – garden weeds, in her case, a computer game character, in his. But the two have distinctly di%erent virological imaginaries. In Invader’s case, the virus causes the host cell to explode, the simplicity of its biological information setting o% replication processes just as the easily-duplicable and transient nature of the works of street art throws the art market out of whack.5 In Slonina’s case, the virus is a guest that adheres to the surface and allows novel entities to emerge, in an approach more in keeping with that of land art. The toadstools sprouting straight out of disco balls or plastic patio chairs, like the ones that grow on forest trees, could be called viruses, for example, but parasite perhaps is a better word, since the mushrooms form a symbiotic relationship with the host organism and contribute, consequently, to the accommodation of new forms of life.

Thus, the work of Aurélie Slonina puts to test the "lters we deliberately produce by looking at what is real from the perspective of the so-called in"ltrators. With her narratives of plant species that "lter through the limits of what is acceptable, she questions the relativity of the assessment mechanisms we put into place, such as the di%erent biosecurity measures adopted in Paris, Berlin, or Los Angeles for the regulation of plant life in artworks. All of her works can therefore be seen as experiments in “that which "lters through” in a speci"c environment, the artist’s play on the appearances of what we think of as “nature” giving her work its particular critical resonance.

Guillaume Lassere

Curator - Art critic / 2018

Aurélie Slonina, the art of positive infiltration Nominated for the MAIF Prize with “Special Guest”, a sculpture-architecture project that brings together contrary notions to reveal the inconsistencies of our times, Aurélie Slonina continues to infiltrate undesirable elements into urban space. Her hybrid works bear witness to the illusory attempt to masterfully domesticate the living.

Among the five finalists shortlisted by the jury for the eleventh MAIF Sculpture Prize is only one woman, Aurélie Slonina. A discreet artist, for the past twenty years her work has questioned the place occupied by nature in urban spaces by infiltrating “undesirables” into public or private places. In this way, she gives pride of place to what is deliberately hidden or refused to be seen, disrupting man's control over an environment he strives to master. In form and content, his works are the meeting points of two diametrically opposed worlds: one organized and under control, the other anarchic and considered harmful. Like Austrian artist Lois Weinberger, she uses the metaphor of a plant community to reveal human society.She favors “weeds”, which she gives a new status when she presents them in the extremely composed parterres of French gardens. “Special Guest” is an opportunity to revisit the committed work of the artist, who has returned to the Paris region, where she now lives and works after several stays in Berlin and several years in Los Angeles. Two cities, two cultures, whose influence can be seen in her work. Art and nature, present on every street corner in the German capital, reinforce her taste for the study of urban vegetation evolving under surveillance. In California, she experienced the desert and the light, and felt the immensity of the spaces in the City of Angels. Her sense of infinity gave her a new approach to space. This city of the future, already obsolete, exudes an ordinary strangeness that gives the impression that anything is possible.

Hybridizing opposing notions

A project for a bronze sculpture, “Special guest” is a continuation of Aurélie Slonina's work, which, by showing what we don't want to see, underlines the ambivalence of an era that is, to say the least, contradictory in its management of life and its flows. Here, she reveals a lasting provisionality by choosing to use a robust material to represent the fragility of the folds of a giant origami made from blue plastic sheeting, now a symbol of the precarious housing of migrants. A commonplace witness to the scale of the humanitarian crisis unfolding here and now, this ordinary piece of plastic multiplies with each new arrival to become omnipresent in our urban space. This tragic allegory of emergency and distress becomes part of our daily lives as the temporary becomes constant. To physically embody this perpetuity of precariousness, the artist brings together the two contradictory notions in a plastic fusion. Aurélie Slonina composes hybrid works generated by the fusion of opposites, metaphorical representations of the world's dissonances. The disquiet caused here is reinforced by a plural interpretation of the material.While the solid quality of the bronze contradicts the lightness of the tarpaulin to make tangible the effect of a temporary that lasts, on the other hand, it ennobles the poverty of the plastic. The precious alloy of copper and tin, traditionally reserved for the representation of elites and kings, imposes a magnified image of migrants. The solemn brilliance of brass erases the prejudices that stigmatize these populations. In this way, Aurélie Slonina shifts the way we look at others, those who are different. The makeshift habitat embodied by the blue plastic tarpaulin is transformed into a poetic object under the folds of the Japanese art of origami. Let's make no mistake about it: although at first glance it may seem weighty and playful, Aurélie Slonina's sensitive art uses plastic form to make a political statement.

A graduate of the Ecole nationale supérieure de Paris-Cergy in 1996, she has made nature the main focus of her research. Far from proposing a bucolic image of wild landscapes, she depicts nature as urban, in other words, captive, controlled and artificial. The nature that interests her is that of cities, a nature hybridized by the will of men who place it under surveillance. In Aurélie Slonina's work, nature takes the form of organic flying saucers, graffiti planters and video game landscapes, testifying to the ambiguous relationship we have with our natural environment. However, there's no question of returning to the concept of a mythical land before mankind. For the artist, there is no original Eden.

His art documents with the utmost precision man's actions in transforming nature in an urban context, taming it in the city. Nature, simulated as it is in green spaces, is obliged to mutate in order to meet the common (and therefore artificial) constraints of city organization and operation. However, a totally domesticated nature, entirely under control, is nothing but an illusion. Weeds grow under concrete. Considered a nuisance, kept at a safe distance for fear of anarchy and chaos, they nevertheless prove untamable, growing proudly in the cracks of the concrete slabs, as if to assert their existence and their right to be different. The troubling parallel with human society invites us to reconsider our relationship with the other, “undesirable” in our environment because they are different, just as weeds are in a controlled urban vegetation space. Aurélie Slonina's art allows the presence of outcasts where they are precisely forbidden:ruderal plants responding to the geometric rigor of a French garden based on a plan by Le Nôtre (“Friche à la française”, plant installation, 2009-12), nettles delimiting a labyrinth - a symbol of discipline through mastery of the game - in a public garden (“Labyrinthe”, plant installation, 2010), images of forests planted by man that follow one another in a video whose jerky editing disturbs this harmony, reminding us of its artifice (“Flying saucer”, video, 2014), plants colonizing a basket and various other objects, ephemeral witnesses of a life prior to an ecological catastrophe, porcelain works whose fragile preciousness contradicts the dilapidated state of these elements left to decay (“Sunrise”, glazed porcelain, 2015).

Anne Le Goff

Philosopher - UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics / 2015

Nature in the city is made up of small islands, sanctuaries for tamed vegetation. Supposed to give city dwellers a touch of authenticity, a testimony to a mythical Garden of Eden, these pieces of nature have nothing natural about them. Aurélie Slonina reveals the new strangeness of these hybrid entities, nature entirely thought out and worked by man. From flying saucers to virtual video-game landscapes, the new nature has become supernatural.

However, her work does not evoke a lost state of nature, or a wilderness that existed before or outside the city and human civilization. This untouched nature is merely a myth, and Aurélie Slonina never ceases to show us the intricate interweaving of human artifice and nature. What is Nature in this new era called the Anthropocene, where human activities are no longer just taking place in nature, but have begun to have a decisive effect on the whole planet? Botanist and urban gardener Aurélie Slonina observes these artifacts, these hybrids of nature and human culture, with fascination and meticulousness. Like nature's tinkerer, she cultivates all kinds of materials to bring these objects to life and make them visible to us. At a time when the world's cities are reinventing themselves so that they are no longer the opposite of nature, but seek to recognize and develop their intertwining with nature, by creating green corridors and encouraging local species and biodiversity, Aurélie Slonina invites us, with humor, to reappropriate our urban technological environment, the fruit of nature and human invention. It's within our cities that we need to cultivate nature.

Nature is the selected squares of flowers we display amidst the concrete. Nature is the electromagnetic waves superimposed on the trellises on which we've grown plants, constituting our new natural environment. Nature is the “natural” smells we capture in plastic boxes using molecules created ad hoc. It's impossible to separate the artificial from pure nature. By replacing air fresheners in their “natural” environment, so that they breathe the air of the sea or the forest, Aurélie Slonina reveals the incongruous artificiality of the object in the face of the element from which it is supposed to give us a whiff. But this is not to reveal its “true” nature to our gaze. On the contrary, the installation reminds us that our gaze always transforms nature, giving it a certain meaning. Here, it is through the eyes (nose) of the air freshener, a new avatar of the romantic traveler contemplating the sea, that we look at the landscape before our eyes.

Let's beware of the illusion of a definitively enclosed, totally domesticated nature. For the weeds we've named grow between the concrete slabs, and the nettles sting our ankles. With Aurélie Slonina, these weeds take up residence in the neat, symmetrical layout of a formal garden and play tricks on our perfect plans. Mushrooms take over the living room under the trees, growing on the artificial wall of the Buttes Chaumont, disrupting and reappropriating what we had defined as beautiful, civilized nature.

It grows, grows, until we ourselves grow, with the figure of the hooded man, the green city-dweller, the vegetal mutant. This silhouette, which reappears at a distance in Aurélie Slonina's work, is both recognizable and unidentifiable. A cosmopolitan figure of the Urban, he could be a “suburban youth” or a “hipster”. Beneath the camouflage of his cosmopolitan uniform, he is himself part of the urban furniture, a hybrid organic figure, the offspring of the city and technology. Aurélie Slonina doesn't assign him a predetermined meaning, any more than she does to the other human figures she places here and there in her work. It's up to these characters to invent themselves - and for us to invent ourselves and define our role in the choices we make in social space.

And meaning emerges in the city, as in the plant graffiti imagined by Aurélie Slonina and displayed by people on their balconies. In this urban environment, the natural becomes the exceptional, and beckons. The graffiti-geraniums, distant descendants of Moses' burning bush revived by Aurélie Slonina, are the place where meaning, energy or frustration are expressed in a way that the city cannot contain. The tensions are there too, and with Games, Aurélie Slonina goes so far as to show the house on fire. Here, too, she opens up possible avenues: imminent danger or simple play, it's up to us...

Sophie Peyrard pour GREENKISS

www.greenkiss.fr / 2013

Your latest exhibition at the Galerie Jeune Création (Young Creators Gallery), was entitled Vegetal Invaders #1. A plant invasion ?
One of my works was a series of stickers that could be placed anywhere, like street art. They were giant, urban window boxes. Those were more concrete than plant life, and this time they look more like flying saucers floating in space, come to invade us. Like a modified type of nature, the type we grow in green houses, the type we use fertilizers on. In my work, nature has two forms: the ‘modified’ one, and the wild one, the unwanted plants…

It reminds me of your other creation, Wild/Crash/Push, those graffiti shaped geranium flower boxes…
Yes, another example of ‘modified’ nature, like those flowers one puts on the window sill and on balconies, that you can buy at Truffaut or Jardiland, all that nature-in-a-box on one side, and on the other, graffiti that grows like weeds, which we strive to get rid of, and that keep coming back. These special window boxes were born from the clash of these two worlds, hybrid objects sprung from two opposite ideas. Clean meets trash, order meets chaos.

You also have a creation called Mauvaises Herbes (Weeds), can you tell us a little about it ?
I drew up plans for a French garden, like the ones created by Le Notre in the XVIIth Century, but distorted. Those gardens are very controlled, rigorously drawn by man. But instead of planting rose bushes and box trees, I put nettles, brambles, and other weeds that I had collected in urban settings. I was fascinated by the improbable mix that sprung from this association. The absurdity of it all illustrates mankind’s excessive control over nature that ends up getting out of hand, slipping into chaos… all the way down to GM foods and plants. I wanted to show that too much control over nature leads to abnormality.
I am also a great fan of a piece you made called « Fraicheur Marine » (Sea Breeze), which was very funny and offbeat. Can you tell us about it ?
All of the time, I get an idea because I have to work off the cuff. I was invited to the Anglet’s art festival, which was on the sea front. I was working at the time on the relationship between nature and artificiality, so I automatically came up with this idea : a sea-shore air-freshener ! On my arrival, the smell of salt water was so strong… Once it had been build, it almost felt like the smell came from the art instead of the sea ! It is completely artificial but fits beautifully in the background because it is almost the same colour as the sky, so much so that it sometimes is hard to see. It also looks like a surf board or a boat’s keel… It was like an artificial lung which was managing to integrate perfectly into a natural landscape.

What does working on ‘modified’ nature tell us about yourself ?
I grew up in a privileged neighbourhood where nature was very controlled. There were little streams, artificial lakes and bridges, very 1900’s. That is what I grew up with, what made me who I am. This artificiality, like a giant Smurf village, is also something I can’t stand. I needed to breath, I went out looking for urban waste lands.
Do you believe that artists are meant to influence our vision of nature and the environment ?
I am very aware of environmental issues, and I think we should take a stand. But I don’t think my line of work is about preaching, saying « we have to eat organic food ! We have to take care of our planet ! » That is not what I am trying to convey. I do not think it is my place to do so. An artist has to create wonder, surprise and questions. Sometimes it is through surprise that thought occurs.

Can you tell us a secret ?
My wildest dream would be to visit another planet.

François de Coninck

Anversville Gallery/ 2012

Is nature soluble in culture? This is undoubtedly the ideal of big cities, as embodied today in green spaces, and the fantasy of those who design them as much as those who frequent them: failing to have fun in the great outdoors, urbanites are now inventing playgrounds that act as if they were. For these green spaces would like to look like they do - the pure air of the countryside, the countryside before the environment - but on closer inspection, they don't look like it at all: these pretty swathes of greenery, cut, delimited, landscaped, synthesized, fattened and packaged in a protective atmosphere, are decidedly too green to be honest. Of course, they make our lives a little dull - that old tin rod cast in concrete needs to be knocked out now and then - but, above all, they tell us about our projections of a magnified state of nature and our insatiable desire to domesticate things, which the development of technical means of mastering everything that grows, teems, flourishes and blooms in the interstices of our well-regulated existence only exacerbates. Aurélie Slonina's Friches à la francaise (Weeds) in Halles à charbon is a mischievous reminder of this: following the layout of a 17th-century French garden, her parterre de broderie is composed entirely of weeds - brambles, nettles, dandelions, dandelions, thistles and other clumps of unknown plants to which we don't usually pay much attention. As Jules Renard noted at the end of the 19th century, “A weed is a grass for which we have not yet found a use”. So we had to wait for Aurélie Slonina before an answer blossomed like a natural smile at the corner of our lips. Finally, on the plain overlooking the upper part of the site, a monumental air freshener, freed from its domestic setting and sanitary use, beautifully completes the artist's work of depolluting our imagination. With Fraîcheur végétale, the ideal of the living room (or household arts) is over: it simply evaporates into Nature.

Vincent Pécoil

Triple V gallery / 2010

Aurélie Slonina creates an art «after nature», but the nature in question here has nothing to do with the pastoral visions of yesteryear. This nature has not only been domesticated, but synthesised, and adapted to the urban word - a nature that has become «green spaces», a purely negative definition of what nature is (in other words, everything which in the city is neither tar nor concrete). This negative space may be the result of urban planning, as in couvre-feu, or a «wild» (read:individual) intervention, as in Wild, where the flowery decoration (of balconies) is utilised as some sort of graffiti or tag, applied flower pot-wise. Both are actually a sort of signature or expression of self, a way of signalling one’s own presence in the urban space, of individualising a part of the territory.

A different Wilde (first name Oscar) thought that it was nature that imitated art. That it was the London fog which imitated the painting of Turner or Monet, and not the other way around. Our present-day nature is no longer the same as the one in London in the 19th century, it imitates abstract painting (the colza fields make great Peter Halleys), but also Dada and New Realism; it has also turned to recycling everything within its reach. What is deemed natural today, is above all the whole concern regarding base materials. By recycling forms and objects, the-visionary- art of the 20th century has played its pioneering role in what has become an economic and ecological imperative (recycling), and we can discern in Aurélie Slonina’s work, which is an image of art as much as of the nature it imitates, an attempt at looping the loop.

The function of fertilizers, air fresheners, and artifcial colouring is to make actual nature closer to ideal nature. Thus artifice applied to nature fits into a kind of classicism. By suggesting it is sending out the scent of the sea, Fraîcheur Marine [Sea Freshness] (a sculpture in the shape of a giant room fragrance device set on the coast line) casts doubton the true origin of “scent” (which is to the sense of smell what 'green space' is to nature). It is therefore coherent that Aurélie Slonina should explore other forms of classicism, such as formal French gardens, or their distant heirs, such as the succession of central reservations and roundabouts in Couvrefeu [Curfew], whose sequence conjures up a Morse sentence. From the underlying ideal of classicism also sprung the objective to bring nature under control, which is still guiding our civilization. In Aurélie Slonina's work, the formal French garden, an expression of the Cartesian will to become “masters and owners of Nature”, meets with the universal childlike pleasure of controlling miniature worlds. Both these ambitions are fairly mischievously called upon to cancel each other.