Eat the soil
Tasting ritual

Karine Bonneval's work, on the lookout for new fields of knowledge, relies on the resources of nature and science to nourish research into a new way of showing and perceiving the living world around us. For Cahors Juin Jardins, Karine Bonneval proposes a sound landscape for a tasting ritual, the result of work begun several years ago on invisible exchanges between plants and humans.
With Dendromité (in intimacy with the tree) first, Karine Bonneval gives you the opportunity to listen to the sound of tree bark and breathe with them. Then she thinks of a device to listen to the earth, this living-all with whom we are in constant dialogue. Convinced that the soil on which we live is not a simple and inert matter, but a world in constant interaction,complex and organized, fertile and nourishing, microscopic and mineral, she realizes with Fanny Rybak, bioacoustician at the University of Orsay, sound recordings of various samples of soil more or less "living", amplified by black ceramic pieces inspired by fungi (mushrooms) shapes and emerging from a substrate spread on the floor of the exhibition spaces: the installation "Ecouter la terre".
In parallel, and in collaboration with culinary designer Carole Bélénus, she is creating a film, becoming a plant, shot in the greenhouses of the Berlin Botanical Garden. In this fiction, a duo taking up the myth of Adam and Eve wander through this anthropomorphic nature in search of a magical substance that will take them to a higher stage: eating the soil to become a plant.
In Cahors, a sonorous and gustatory landscape is displayed in the square Jouvenel on a series of tables, inviting to a ceremonial gathering. Masters of ceremonies guide the ritual, offering to choose their black ceramic vessel to collect plots of small valleys of earth and wild plants. The soil, in complex and unexpected flavours, can be tasted, to the sound of the underground life of the ground emerging from the sculptures "listening to the soil". Traces of this strange ceremony, unique handmade pieces, the containers are offered for memory to the curious who will have eaten the soil.
This experience to be shared is the result of a collaborative effort with Jérôme Moulinou, pastry chef and Claudine Boyer, ethnobotanist, in order to design and produce the taste mixtures landscaped culinary preparations, and the technical support of Caroline Rosse. It is also the product of participatory workshops with the inhabitants of Cahors, who shaped the containers for the experience - with the support of the ceramist Ingrid Paul at the MJC.

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