Nathalie Rey

Invited to create a work as part of the Cahors Juin Jardins festival, Nathalie Rey proposes an installation that is both seductive and disconcerting. In a context that she qualifies as post-nature, Décharge chic juxtaposes the human and natural worlds in order to create a bizarre and beautiful environment that challenges the viewer to reflect upon industrial activity and the pollution it generates.

For this 18th edition of the Cahors Juin Jardins festival, Nathalie Rey creates a resilient garden in which the vegetation has developed in the middle of plastic waste (multicolored wrapping of straw bales) from a "private" dump, collected, cleaned, and stored by the artist. "I imagine a kind of literal transposition of this pile of rubbish whose strangeness in the middle of the landscape had caught my eye, which thus becomes the device allowing me to illustrate in a very concrete way one of the aspects of the problem of pollution", explains Nathalie Rey. Thus, the basis of her approach is drawn from the dustbins of consumerism, from the waste which invades, pollutes, and poisons us.

“Beyond pollution, what I would like to highlight is the end of a certain idea of nature, which culminated with Romanticism, sublime, frightening, eternal. Because there is no longer a single corner of the planet left untouched by human footprints”, she laments. To denounce the disappearance of a “natural” nature, she creates an installation where the artificial takes over.

With the financial support of the Regional Department of Cultural Affairs Occitanie.