Michel Boulanger grew up in a vast landscape shaped by fields and tall grasses. Fascinated by these vistas and what they contain\u200a\u2014\u200afarms, animals, agricultural machinery, plants, and humans\u200a\u2014\u200ahe has made them the principal motifs in his art practice, allowing him to voice his concerns about forms of life and the machines that encompass and instrumentalize them. Drawing, a central medium in his work, extends into installations, digital images, and video animation. Through these disciplines, he highlights the increasingly rapid transformation of the rural environment in recent decades due to the extensive deployment of technologies in industrial agriculture. Dehumanized and anchored in productivism, and no longer seeming, as it were, connected with Earth\u2019s living system, industrialized farming presents distinct political challenges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Boulanger addresses these concerns through the motif of the landscape, conceived as a construction of the real and a prime representation of how we may perceive nature. He questions the utility of spaces developed by and for the agricultural sector, schematizing them using a hybrid of modelling and sketching techniques.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the corpora Dans ces rangs de lignes press\u00e9es<\/em> (2022) and Condition de la vache<\/em> (2022), Boulanger portrays our relationships with institutions that promote intensive agriculture in order to better reimagine and retransform them. Arising from the perpetual complexification of technology is a sense of failure and the underlying realization of our inability to live harmoniously with the living beings that feed us. Through openworked volumes and ambiguous blurred entanglements, Boulanger underlines their erasure, questioning the permission we give ourselves to make the living appear and disappear. His digital approach upholds his own critical perspective on an increasingly paradoxical form of agriculture, allowing him to play in the grey zones. By successively eliminating machines and the living from his visual explorations, Boulanger reflects on the growing roboticization of nature\u200a\u2014\u200aand in doing so redefines its ontology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translated from the French by Louise Ashcroft<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writer and cultural worker Galadriel Avon studied political science, philosophy, and art history. She is interested in memory, temporality, and filiation. Focused on outlying regions, she explores issues related to territory and peripheries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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