STUTTGART.- Stéphanie Sagot invites us on a Voyage en Terres Amoureuses – but what is implied by such a voyage in loamy and loving lands? Zheng Bo invites us to join them in Drawing Life – but how is life to be drawn when one is a living part and parcel of that life? These questions point to the paradox of any life- and art-sustaining atmosphere. For those who co-build an atmosphere, it is not a stable milieu that can be observed from the outside, even though its constant transformation implies a journey. The elemental structure of what we call an “atmosphere” might be described in formal terms as the encounter between a circle and a line – or many circles, countless lines. At the basis of any atmosphere, two timeframes, one circular and the other linear, metabolize one another. Because an atmosphere is the cross-metabolization of something natural and something else, something unpredicted, something momentarily disruptive of the cycle, it is the setting for any new configuration – it is what happens when a line and a circle meet.

This is also the basic definition of a farm, and what makes the farm a useful lens for understanding atmosphere building. An atmosphere is a kind of a farming project. On a farm, we see the cycle of growth and decay thanks to the distinction we draw between the two, arranging the two movements in succession, in a linear pattern. But nature itself knows no such distinction: growing and decaying are neither separate nor separable; they happen simultaneously and nourish one another, like a tree and the soil, in which it grows and into which it decays. As political theorist Hannah Arendt usefully puts it, like birth and death, growth and decay “have no place in the unceasing, indefatigable cycle in which the whole household of nature swings perpetually.”

Her insight is helpful in making visible the non-natural structure of an atmosphere. The cycle becomes visible only as it is bisected by a line (or a voyager on a linear path), for those momentarily withdrawn from its regimen. Just as the circle presupposes a straight line and becomes a circle by somehow metabolizing the line, so a linear voyage presupposes a circle, from which it has momentarily broken away. As the tree is momentarily singularized from the wood, we gain insight into how an atmosphere is formed; how we, too, are co-builders, farmers, on the great big collective farm that an atmosphere is; voyagers in archipelagos of loamy, loving and circular lands.

The vibrant and ecologically investigative watercolors of Montpellier-based artist Stéphanie Sagot, Voyage en Terres Amoureuses, fill the second floor of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart with all the fullness of a summer harvest – teeming with life and foregrounding interconnectedness with the land, with all that grows, at once documenting resistance and mapping out enclaves of potentiality. Sagot’s large-format watercolors are at once maps and paintings of land usership and agroecological practice – depicting both what is and what might be –, fusing geopolitical, institutional and profoundly personal landscapes. They map what the artist calls “terres amoureuses” – loamy, loving lands – and the relationships that they nurture, taking their historical inspiration from Madeleine de Scudéry’s 1654 “Carte de tendre,” based on a visual geography of emotions. As the atmosphere evolves, Sagot will produce a similar such map of the Künstlerhaus itself as an ecosystem, indeed as a kind of farm in its own right. Through workshops, observations and conversations with the farmership of the house, she will create a cartography of the Künstlerhaus Farm in its complex relational and physical landscape.

Voyage en Terres Amoureuses is constellated as an archipelago of conceptual islets throughout the second floor gallery. Humain Humus, Cartes de Tendre, Résistance and Ecotopie concrète are different cycles of work, connected through visible and subterranean threads cultivating care for living things.

A holistic concept of medicine, drawing on a medieval cosmovision, where art and care are closely intertwined, is the foundation for Humain Humus. Drawing lines between the cosmological imagery of illuminated twelfth-century manuscripts, an altar honoring decomposition, and contemporary theories of One Health, these works telescope far-flung imaginaries of not-yet-realized utopies with more documentary landscapes of meditation and the life of the soil. Cartographies of agriculture, political ecology, agroforestry and livestock farming intersect through lived relationships in the imaginary landscapes of Cartes de Tendre. Sagot’s maps document the collective constellations of the artist-farming collective INLAND, blending rurality and urbanity, economy and shepherding; food resilience and urban farming in Zone Sensible; permaculture and trance healing in Férale.

“We are Nature defending itself” reads a slogan on a woman’s t-shirt in Resistance. The Larzac plateau in southern France has been a focal point of sustainable farming practices and agroecological experiments – and remains a hotbed of peasant-led resistance to monoculture, chemical-intensive agriculture, land appropriation and the militarization of “underused” or “empty” landscapes. In 1971, 103 smallholder farmers rose up against the expansion of a French military base on the plateau, an initiative to which Sagot pays tribute in her “Terre Amoureuse – Gardarem lo Larzac,” and Larzac today is a vital landscape of ongoing resistance. A loamy and loving landscape, and an emblem of the continued fight for the health of living soils, the free flow of rivers and the cultivation of a shared atmosphere.

Ecotopie concrète points toward post-extractivist practices in such works as Le Nouveau Ministère de l’Agriculture. From 2016-2023, in collaboration with Suzanne Husky, Stéphanie Sagot took the agricultural policies of the French Ministry of Agriculture as a central object of study and détournement. Responding to the government agency’s unfulfilled responsibility to care for biodiversity, animal welfare, the well-being of farmers, soil health, and food sustainability, Le Nouveau Ministère de l’Agriculture created a manifesto, developed media outreach, appointed a highly qualified but highly unconventional Minister, and together created a drawing, a vision, a visual statement: Aux Arbres! Le Nouveau Ministère de l’Agriculture. Ecotopie concrète might be seen as a tool-sharing initiative, in order to rethink agricultural circles, bringing them into contact and collision with radically different lines of thought and enquiry.