Situated on a forested island on a lake in the rural Plateau de Millevaches in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, the Centre International d’Art et du Paysage—Île de Vassivière (CIAPV) is about as far removed from a major industrialised city as one can get in France.
A carbon footprint analysis mandated by the French government last year confirmed what the bucolic surroundings already suggested: CIAPV’s carbon footprint was not especially high. But about 95% of the art centre’s emissions came from a single, indispensable source: its visitors.
“Because we’re in a rural location and there are next to no modes of public transportation, you are basically obliged to take a car,” the executive director Alexandra McIntosh tells The Art Newspaper. “We also have an international exhibition and residency programme, but we’re not about to limit our programming to only regional artists, and obviously we’re not going to close the doors to visitors.”
Internationally focused arts centres located far from major cities face a particular challenge in the era of climate change. McIntosh, who notes the irony that CIAPV’s rural surroundings are part of its allure for artists and visitors alike, is drawing inspiration from the environment, ecology and history of Vassivière Island.
“A lot of our thinking now is how can we mitigate the carbon footprint of our visitors in other ways,” she says. “We have the great benefit of being an art centre on an island, so we’re surrounded by green space and forests and water. There are concrete things that we can do to increase biodiversity and to reduce, let’s say, surface temperatures and air temperatures.”
The island and its wilderness are the consequences of human activity and intervention. Before the construction of a nearby hydroelectric dam flooded the surrounding valley, Vassivière was not an island, but the area’s highest point. The region’s primary economic activities have also reformed the landscape—first agriculture, then logging.
The forests are the result of human intervention; Douglas fir is not native to the region, but was imported and planted after the Second World War. Vassivière Island’s “natural” environment and ecology is therefore, in a sense, the unintended consequence of a long history of deliberate human activity. This manmade landscape’s history will now help determine the best way forward to minimise human impact, McIntosh says. “There are forested patches, there’s open fields, and then there’s the shoreline,” she says. “In some of the more open fields, we’re going to initiate a kind of wild growth.”
McIntosh plans to work with a local organisation to measure insect life and conduct inventories in the first and second years to see whether biodiversity increases with what she describes as “rewilding in a very controlled situation”.
For the island’s forested patches, CIAPV will work both with forestry experts from Nouvelle-Aquitaine, as well as the French botanist and biologist Francis Hallé, to develop a “test forest” designed to manage itself without direct human intervention. “With humans kept at the periphery, the test forest becomes a site for fauna and flora to flourish and evolve at their own pace,” McIntosh says. CIAPV also plans to plant pollinating flowers to attract and sustain plant and animal diversity.
Efforts to minimise and mitigate CIAPV’s carbon footprint require considerations across multiple levels, including the problems inherent with being an international arts centre and residency programme with global appeal.
“We’re not going to make artistic decisions based on where people live,” McIntosh says. “Let’s say an artist wants to do a project using particular materials that are not especially conducive to good environmental practices. We would have that conversation with the artist but, ultimately, they are the authors of their work. If they are really adamant about working with a particular material or a particular form, we would try to support that as best we could and mitigate the impact in other ways.”
Since taking on her role as director in June 2021, McIntosh says questions around ecological concerns and environmental connectedness have permeated a number of CIAPV’s shows, and that will continue in the year ahead. The environment also clearly occupies artists applying to the residency programme: “We had over 100 applications, and so many were taking into account environmental questions.”
