Water at the heart of the 10 winning projects of “Composing knowledge to imagine a sustainable future” 2025

How can we address the issue of water, show, understand and transmit the multiplicity of its pathways and its conservation issues in the territories? From French Guiana to Nouvelle Aquitaine and the Alpes Maritimes, it is this essential civic commitment that the artists and scientists of the 10 projects selected for this 7th edition of our call for projects ” Composing knowledge to imagine a sustainable future” will carry out. These projects were selected by the Foundation for their uniqueness and impact from among more than 300 applications. In a context where water governance is crucial, their actions will contribute to (re)composing knowledge to raise awareness, mobilize, poetize and move towards a just and sustainable ecological transition.

Irrigating the composition of knowledge

Water is a vital and omnipresent element that binds us together and is the foundation of our humanity. It has also become one of the major challenges for our ecosystems. The effects of climate change, overexploitation and pollution are putting it at risk, exacerbating tensions around its management. By launching this call, we wanted to encourage the awareness and involvement of civil society, by supporting artistic projects that take this issue into consideration.

At the heart of this new class of laureates is the very driving force behind the call “Composing Knowledge”: to encourage cooperation and synergies between the arts, science and society.

Creating new cooperation with eco-designed protocols and production methods

“These projects involve unprecedented collaborations between researchers and artists, whose experience and poetic accuracy make it possible to both raise awareness and mobilize groups of citizens on a territorial scale, while proposing models of action on a larger scale. Also, all the projects stand out for their commitment to a just and sustainable ecological transition, in particular through eco-designed protocols and production methods, a central criterion of the call and a priority for the Foundation as part of its new strategy,” explains Thibault Gerbail, Head of Citizen Art France programs.

A strategy that resonates with the actions of public policies as well as other mechanisms supported by the Foundation: “The call for projects meets an important dimension of the public policies in favor of ecology implemented by the Ministry of Culture, namely cooperation, which appears to be an essential condition for going beyond eco-gestures and allowing for profound and systemic changes. It is thus both fully coherent and complementary to the “Green Residencies ” scheme deployed by the General Directorate for Artistic Creation and supported by the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation,” explains Frédérique Sarre, Head of the DGCA – Ministry of Culture Ecological Transformation of Creation Mission and member of the jury.

Fuelling the ecological transition with new imaginaries

Through emotion and imagination, art sheds light on the consequences of climate change and human activity on water resources. This is what David Redon, member of the jury and Cultural and Territorial Action Advisor DRAC Nouvelle-Aquitaine, points out: “These initiatives can inspire new models of cooperation, contribute to transforming institutional practices and feed a collective reflection on the major social, cultural and ecological transitions. To put it in the words of the philosopher and poet Edouard Glissant, the laureates’ proposals reopen the horizon and already show an imagined world where the experience promised by these “compositions of knowledge”, by confronting the discontinuities, the incompleteness, the impossible even of a totalizing experience, gives a glimpse of the schema of the multiplicity of “worlds to come”. »

Water is also an essential resource for agriculture, which uses about 70% of the world’s freshwater consumption. The quality and availability of water are essential for food security, another pillar of the Foundation’s work for the past 15 years through the Sustainable Food axis.

With this Citizen Art call for projects, the Foundation is also composing its own knowledge between art and sustainability.

The results of the call in a few figures

• More than 300 applications
• 9 departments represented among the selected projects
• 10 winning projects
• Dozens of artists, scientists/researchers mobilized by the projects for a cooperative approach
• A diversity of artistic practices : storytelling, photography, drawing, video, dance…
• So many forms of water addressed : shortage, flooding, watercourses, water and its fauna…
• Various temporalities : reacting to a climate emergency, reviving ancestral knowledge, restoring vulnerable environments…
• A multiplicity of sensitized audiences : the general public, decision-makers, schoolchildren, residents…

A fair and demanding selection process

A jury of experts from the world of art and research met in July 2025 to deliberate on the projects submitted and select the winners. Among them, Julia Passot, Artistic Designer and former winner of Composer les savoirs 2023 with the association La Turbine testifies ” I was curious to experience this call for projects from another perspective. I felt very aware of the needs of project leaders, their needs and their realities. This gave me the feeling that I could make choices that were also more aware of the specific challenges of the Foundation: the relevance of the projects in relation to the theme of water, but also complementarity in terms of territory, structures and tools mobilized. »

The various members of the jury and the Foundation praised the quality of the participatory approaches proposed, with, as David Redon points out , “many project leaders have integrated, from the design stage of their project, an in-depth reflection on the place of beneficiaries and partners in co-construction. There is a fundamental movement towards a science and culture that is more collaborative, open, and attentive to social and environmental issues. »

Who are the 10 winners?

The Stronghold – Regenerative Hydrology: For a Landscape Written by Water

Lot et Garonne

This project is part of the development, on the estate of the Château de Monbalen, where La Maison forte is located, of a large-scale cultural project dedicated to ecological, social and cultural transitions. It aims to carry out a process of regeneration of aquatic environments adapted to the particular territory of the springs of the Masse d’Agen which flows at the bottom of the estate. To do this, artists and scientists will work with residents, experts and users to make the various issues visible and better known: contamination, biodiversity, importance of water, presence of nitrogen.

L’Avant-Scène Cognac – (Agri)cultural activities in the Charente area

Charente

The project consists of meeting farmers who practice agriculture that respects water cycles and is conducive to its preservation in order to collect their perceptions and knowledge, empirical and vernacular, to highlight and share them in experiential artistic forms. The aim is to debate and share knowledge that is invisible to industrial agriculture, to show its relevance and relevance in facing the ecological challenges of the twenty-first century and thus changing the way we look at the role of small producers and the way in which their sensitive link to land and water can respond to the emergencies and expectations of society. The project is organized in 3 cycles, each with different times: a time of surveying the territory, a time of companionship and collection of testimonies, a time of shaping and a time of public restitution.

C.A.M.P – Inheriting water, probing our landfills to relate to the invisible

Morbihan

The project will be a singular variation of the artistic and cultural project of the Maison Germaine Tillion (resistance fighter and ethnologist) which is articulated around 3 axes: inhabiting vulnerable environments; welcoming otherness in an open place; transmit and share knowledge in all its diversity. This project plans to combine two actions: the activation of the scientific tool “Water and Territory Trajectory”, a kind of serious game, which mobilizes collective intelligence to understand how the hydrosystem and the water cycle of a watershed work; the hosting of 3 artists in residence for 3 months. The entire project will also be the subject of a publication, the dramaturgical notebook, as well as a documentary film.

ChoréACTIF – The Water Carriers

Puy-de-Dôme

ChoréActif wishes to awaken the ecological awareness and commitment of participants in sustainable water management. The aim of the artistic project Les Porteuses d’eau is to help raise awareness among beneficiaries (schoolchildren, residents, the general public) about water conservation through courses of reappropriation of knowledge. The association chooses to recall the link between the living, water, and the fundamental role of water carriers in communities. To do this, creative mediation actions will be carried out over 3 years, to rehabilitate the cultural, poetic and emotional dimension of water: reappropriation of stories, myths and local stories, sensory and artistic explorations. The project will rely on local associations, residents and researchers to enrich this collective and sensitive approach.

GRAOU – Atlas of invisible ecologies

Guyana

Through the study of a diversity of Guyanese gardens in several districts of Cayenne, the Atlas of Invisible Ecologies project aims to reveal a culture of water forged by the experience of risk, abundance and scarcity. It will make it possible to record gestures of care, agricultural gestures, adaptation techniques, stories and practices specific to humid and unstable environments. This collective work, carried out with residents, scientists and artists, intends to bring these informal and invisible practices into existence in the debate on climate adaptation and resource management.

Excideuil Town Hall and Les Grandes Fenêtres – L’Eyraudie

Dordogne

The project, called Eyraudie, consists of a sensitive and physical route that follows and reveals the underground rivers and the karst vein. The path of the water was modelled by the scientific team (including the hydrogeologist from the BRGM – National Geological Survey) and the SMBI – Syndicat Mixte du Bassin de l’Isle. The idea for the route comes from citizen workshops organized by the Town Hall of Excideuil and co-supported by Les Grandes Fenêtres. This route will be materialized by sculptures in karst rocks from the collapsed cliff. In the longer term, this route, thanks to the involvement of residents, scientists, artists but also technicians from the community of municipalities and the mixed association, is intended to prefigure other developments in the municipality around water by integrating the inhabitants.

Rural workshop in Roya – Roya Open Sources

Alpes Maritimes

The Roya Open Sources project is a cooperation project between local artists, inhabitants, associations and researchers in a mountain territory bordering Italy, the Roya valley. In 2020, the latter suffered from storm Alex, causing exceptional destruction, a lasting change in the riverbed and the mapping of the many springs. Residents have lost access to water and are now threatened with shortages. An interdisciplinary scientific team is currently studying these upheavals, taking into account local and popular knowledge of the water heritage. This connection is supported by the creation and mediation actions on the water carried out by a collective of artists living in the valley. The aim of this project is to strengthen the emerging synergy between these actors for a collective increase in skills that will give residents the opportunity to engage in water management alongside institutions. The challenge is at stake in citizen mobilization, the popularization of scientific knowledge and artistic creation as a link between all stakeholders.

Ricochets on the cobblestones – La Vieille Mer

Seine-Saint Denis

Led by Des Ricochets sur les pavés, a structure specialising in cultural urban planning, with several experiences around water considered as a “common good”, the project aims to support the construction and renaturation of the Vieille Mer, as part of a proactive policy of the Department with a view to restoring Seine-Saint-Denis’ dimension as a water territory. Regularly in residence over a period of 3 years, the LUIT company (Urban Laboratory of Temporary Intervention) will endeavour to co-design participatory creations, with inhabitants, in interaction with a geographer and researcher, specialist in small urban rivers in order to allow a “poetic resurge” of this 6 km waterway on the outskirts of Saint-Denis, buried for 60 years.

Morula – Ch(e)aux must go on!

Jura

CH(E)AUX MUST GO ON! is an in situ laboratory bringing together scientists (hydrologists, soil scientists, ecologists, philosophers), artists (dance, sound creation, performance), institutions (ONF, OFB, water management unions), schoolchildren and citizens to: produce “communities of attention” to living things and water; experimenting with devices combining artistic creation, scientific transmission, and participation; To achieve a polymorphous restitution: public events, publications, podcasts, choreographic hikes, etc. The objective is to transform representations, promote eco-citizenship and support the effective local management of issues, in the heart of the Chaux forest.

FRAC Poitou-Charentes – Castor Medicine. For inter-species alliances in the face of climate chaos

Nouvelle Aquitaine Region

The project led by the FRAC Poitou-Charentes and its partners aims to contribute to the reflection and impetus of structural changes to better protect rivers and regenerate biodiversity, via “beaver mimetic dams”. The aim is to promote participatory projects aimed at restoring rivers by drawing inspiration from the techniques used by beavers. Projects will be carried out as part of a local approach, involving as much as possible all the stakeholders in water management and use. The primary objective of the projects is to restore the riverbeds, and thus create areas for the regeneration of biodiversity. Activities carried out: participatory projects to create dam areas according to the know-how of beavers, scientific and artistic mediations, creation and dissemination of contemporary works of art and artistic trails, production of scientific knowledge, dissemination of the results of the project during events and meetings.