Sophie Zénon

For over twenty years, Sophie Zénon has sought to show our intimate and collective relationship with the past, questioning our memory and the passage of time. The memory of landscapes is a recurring motif in her work, particularly landscapes of war over the last ten years. From Verdun, ses ruines glorieuses (2013) to Dormeurs de la forêt (2022), via L’homme-paysage (2015) and Pour vivre ici, the botanical world in its various guises (trees, plants, flowers) is a central theme of her universe; it appears in turn tortured, as a marker of history and its vestiges, fragile but always nourishing and in rebirth. Created between 2020 and 2023, L’herbe aux yeux bleus (The Blue-Eyed Grass)¹ marks a new stage in her research, focusing on “obsidional” plants.

The adjective obsidional comes from the Latin obsidionalis, meaning “relating to military siege”. Times of war and unrest are accompanied by massive movements of troops and refugees. They also bring with them new, non-native plants, whether deliberately or otherwise, through seeds in horse fodder, picked up in soldiers’ clothing or on the bottom of their shoes, or through plants grown by the soldiers themselves for medicinal or food purposes.

Her relatively recent botanical research is rich in symbolism and poetry, and provides an original way to outline the history of an area, highlighting our relationship with the environment and reciprocal influences between humans and plants, and to address migration from a particularly innovative angle. Combining natural and anthropogenic processes, this research questions notions of native and exotic species, climate change and movement across territorial and political borders.

Over three years, Sophie Zénon developed a passion for these plants, to the point of devoting her work entirely to them. Accompanied by François Vernier, a botanist from Nancy and specialist in the subject, she travelled through Lorraine, the region of Europe that saw the most troop and population movements in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. To date, 21 plants have been recorded, from Russia, Germany and the United States, introduced during the Napoleonic Wars, Franco-Prussian War and two World Wars. Some have acclimatised so well that they have become invasive. Others owe their survival only to the care provided by botanical conservatories. L’herbe aux yeux bleus tells the story of this human and artistic venture, at the frontiers of art and science.

The series invites us on a journey through intersecting scales of time and space, seeing the landscape as a place of experience and life, paying different forms of attention in direct contact with living things. From making prints of plants (photograms) to stamping bullet-ridden tree trunks, taking photographs of flowers, bark and landscapes to reopening photographic archives, her artistic approach is multifaceted, exploring nature and photography in concrete and experimental ways. It draws on a range of skills and is structured around different protocols, invoking in turn the body in the landscape, the codes of the herbarium and work by hand in the studio.

“Drawing attention to plants that are usually considered insignificant, tracing their history and with it, the history of previous generations, creating a parallel between the introduction of botanical species and human migration, are all ways of creating dialogue around key contemporary issues”, explains the artist.

By weaving together different fields of study and different moments in history, L’herbe aux yeux bleus puts our times into perspective and provides tools to help us live in them.

¹ L’herbe aux yeux bleus (Blue-eyed grass) is the name of a plant introduced to Lorraine by American soldiers during World War I (Sisyrinchium montanum Greene). The work draws on research carried out by botanist François Vernier in Lorraine.