Carried by the wind,
tears of pollen

An installation devised in collaboration with Nicolas Visez, an aerobiologist at LASIRE
(Spectroscopy Laboratory for Interactions, Reactivity and the Environment / CNRS-University of Lille).

Some grasses and trees spread their pollen by the wind, and are said to be anemophilous.
Today, when we think of these plants in our environment, we most often think of allergies caused by pollens emitted in large quantities and subjected to the vagaries of the air. Researchers have shown that these allergies are increased when the air is polluted by human activity.

So how can we rediscover the beauty of these microscopic organisms, designed to transmit life?
In this landscape that plays with scale, anemophilous pollens cohabit with our tears, hatch on giant grasses and trickle down encapsulated. It's an invitation to see them again.

Large swathes of printed muslin redraw the volume of the Asinerie into a theatrical space, where the actors are anemophilous pollens. The almost abstract images on the voile are actually the result of a Petri dish experiment involving birch pollen and our tears. Their evolution gave rise to images taken with a confocal microscope (at the BICeL laboratory at the University of Lille) and printed on the fabric.
In this setting grows an imaginary meadow with a metallic sheen. The 'flowers' bloom in chromatography, a colour analysis process invented at the beginning of the 20th century.
Pollens from 13 species of trees and grasses were prepared in solution and diffused through round filters by capillary action. The chemical process reveals their composition in delicate and unique layers.

Pollen tears
A rosette of dried grasses, harvested from the artist's garden, supports around a hundred tears, in which pollen is embedded. These tears are made of soap and float above our heads in a translucent cloud. They are one stage in a work in progress to imagine how we can once again make a family with pollen carried by the wind, imagining that we can discover new ways of caring for it.

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