Puszcza Bialowieza | La Criée centre d'art contemporain

Date

From Monday December 30, 2024 to Monday January 13, 2025

Since 2023, La Criée has been supporting artist and forester Léa Muller through a long-term research residency in the forest. In this way, the art center supports a form that does not fit within its walls—indeed, one that even cracks the very model of the institution—but which, in doing so, outlines one of the possibilities for the art of tomorrow. Because we must learn not only to see, but also to create and present art in new ways, in order « to bring about, together, a new regime of the sensuous that respects planetary boundaries. »*

About

This residency took on many forms between July 2023 and December 2025: workshops, study days, field surveys, performances, banquets, and more.
To bring the residency to a close, Léa Muller traveled to eastern Poland, to the Białowieża Forest—Europe’s last remaining lowland primeval forest—where she visited in December 2025. Setting out in search of the lost face of the primeval forest, she experienced there the complexity of a space shaped as much by the depth of its botanical and geological history as by that of European and global history.

* David Irle et Anaïs Roesch, in Que repenser ? La liberté artistique dans le contexte des limites planétaires, culture et recherche, p. 127

The residency of Léa Muller and her guests is part of Territoires EXTRA #7

Initiated in 2017 by the Passerelle art center in Brest and La Criée art center in Rennes, and supported by DRAC Bretagne, Territoires EXTRA focuses on three areas: supporting emerging artists in Brittany through production and distribution; building an artistic project in touch with local players in Brittany; and including emerging artists in an international dynamic. Territoires EXTRA takes the form of artists' residencies for research and/or creation, and is accompanied by specific mediation work to strengthen the links between audiences, local partners, institutions and the artistic project, with a view to transmitting and raising awareness of the presence of artists in local areas.