Screening and Conversation with Nicolas Pirus

Residency Restitution: Nicolas Pirus in conversation with Jennifer Houdrouge

Event date: February 20th, 2024, 7PM at Selebe Yoon

Film still of Nicolas Pirus film Simples essais, depicting a 3D model of one of the plants he discovered in the archives during his research.

Nicolas Pirus is a French artist who lives and works in Saint-Etienne. He graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Bourges and the École des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. His work combines film, animation, 3D, writing and installation. He is particularly interested in forgotten narratives and the possible or impossible forms of a digital ecology, with care at the heart of the new narratives he proposes. This is why he works in places where it is possible to bring intimate or collective voices that try to respond to presents in crisis, particularly on the theme of environmental or pharmaceutical issues. His cinema proposes a space between the real, the virtual and the imaginary, which become places of welcome that invoke rather than represent or summon. 

Jennifer Houdrouge: During your residency at Selebe Yoon, you worked on the link between botany and colonialism in Senegal. Can you tell us about the context and your research topic?

Nicolas Pirus: The link between botany and colonialism emerged gradually in my practice. I've always been interested in botany - plants, greenhouses, gardens and herbariums have always fascinated me. During my research, I asked myself how all these elements were constructed, and above all why. Little by little, by looking at the history of objects and places, I came to determine a link between botany and colonialism. It's a fairly strong link historically, since the establishment of botany is linked to colonialism, to the great voyages, and is nourished by all the colonial missions that brought together researchers and botanists in support of the Compagnie des Indes, or exploration missions to collect a body of knowledge about plants in order to index and archive it, to build up a matrix that would serve as a reservoir of information for planning colonial policies.  

JH: From a historical point of view, what methods were used during these colonial missions? For example, in your first film you talk about Michel Adanson, so how many centuries have you gone back in history?

NP: Michel Adanson is indeed from the 18th century - he arrived in Senegal in 1748. His arrival marked the beginning of the history of French botanical missions in Senegal. Adanson was the first French botanist to come and index plants using Western scientific classification methods. What I find particularly interesting is the reason why he came to Senegal - he went first and foremost out of personal ambition, wishing to make a name for himself in the history of botany, as the Senegalese climate had demotivated a large number of naturalists. At the time of his departure, he was working in the King's garden. Louis XV supported the ambition of the voyage but did not finance it - Adanson left at his own expense, then managed to obtain a modest post with the Compagnie des Indes, involved in the trade in plants and colonial crops.

JH: Talking about your first film, you said that it enabled you to unravel the issues around colonial botanical missions that you wanted to explore. What issues would you like to explore in your next film? 

NP: Yes, it was my first research film where I started to unravel and break down this story in order to understand it - in particular the story of Michel Adanson. What's more, a large number of the herbariums collected and compiled during these missions are now available online in digitised form from a fairly large number of natural history museums. The free access given by these institutions to their collections amassed during colonisation has the potential to shed light on the implications of the colonial missions - I didn't know if I was going to be able to study them. There are, of course, many implications caused by free access to these old documents, because of course you uncover very problematic parts of the story. I was also interested in the history of the Taïba phosphates in Senegal. In the archives at IFAN (Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire/Musée Théodore-Monod d'art africain in Dakar), I found a photo that I mention in my film, a photo showing a man presenting a plant and the caption - "Textile plant likely to replace hemp" - indicating that these were textile plants likely to replace existing plantations. In this photo, I immediately saw the colonial interest in this plant, which is only mentioned in terms of how it could be exploited. The aim of this first project was to bring these elements together in order to reconstruct the links and issues involved in the botanical missions, and hence their history, which spans more than two centuries.

JH: There's this idea that we've found a “virgin” land on which to carry out agricultural experiments. And it seems to me that the title of the film - Simples Essais - is quite significant in that regard. 

NP: The title, Simples Essais, is a contraction of two names for two types of garden. As far back as the Middle Ages, there were gardens where so-called "simple" plants were grown for medicinal use. The so-called "trial" gardens were colonial gardens where experiments were carried out on the acclimatization and potential of colonial crop plants. The aim was to make these plants more resistant, more productive and more exploitable. The contraction of these two names is my attempt to highlight the way in which botany has been presented as an innocent discipline, which would have carried out nothing more than simple trials - whereas, in the end, these trials were always carried out with a view not only to listing plants but also to exploiting them as a resource. The title therefore refers to the dual use of gardens.

JH: During our discussions, you told me that botany was used for seeming military purposes?

NP: So that's exactly what I worked on during my residency. I tried to divide the history of the French botanical missions into three periods. The beginning, with Adanson, a sort of innocence of the botanical missions. The second part relates more to the agricultural colonisation that took place in Senegal from 1818 onwards, after the abolition of the slave trade imposed by the English, and against the backdrop of Napoleon's defeat. The royal authorities were faced with the question of how to make the colonies profitable or continue to exploit them - above all, how to continue to profit from slavery by renouncing the deportation of slaves. It was at this point that the political plan was born to move the crops to where the slaves had been deported from, i.e. West Africa, and to continue planting colonial crops in these territories in order to continue exploiting them. This is the part I worked on during my residency, around the history of this agricultural colonisation project. It's quite striking to read in the reports and writings of the time that the botanical and cultivation missions were really envisaged from the outset as a military occupation strategy. Baron Roger, the French administrator who orchestrated this agricultural colonisation, said that war should not be fought with cannons but with pickaxes. And the military vocabulary regularly recurring in his writings shows that the agricultural experiments were designed with the military in mind, and were often entrusted to military personnel. 

JH: Let's go back to the figure of Baron Roger, and in particular this residence, his "folie", in Richard-Toll in the north of Senegal, where you went to do part of your filming. 

NP: Baron Roger's folie is an experimental farm, designed by Baron Roger and gardener Jean Michel Claude Richard. It was from that farm that most of the trials to establish and exploit colonial plants were carried out - it became a base. What's interesting is that a little later in history, this site became a military site, and was even Louis Faidherbe's fort for a time. It's a concrete example of an area that was built for botanical experimentation, but which has taken on a military use and dimension, completely erasing the innocence of botanical experimentation.

JH: What I also find interesting is the relationship with nature. There was this dual relationship between preservation - with the fact of collecting, preserving, classifying and identifying. But at the same time, there's an aspect of predation. Preservation and predation are two things that seem opposed, but which have been quite concomitant throughout the establishment of botanical missions over the centuries.

NP: Yes, which raises the question of why did Western scientists want to preserve or archive? Is it really a question of preserving plants? Or is it to preserve exploitable resources? While Michel Adanson still presented these collections as innocent, with the arrival of Baron Roger and Jean Michel Claude Richard there was no longer any question of preservation, but of production. In the 19th century, it became clear that behind Baron Roger and Jean Michel Claude Richard were military politicians.

JH: Let's talk about the film you're working on at the moment, which will be presented in September at Le Fresnoy in France. In Simples Essais, which you've just presented, you use Michel Adanson as a puppet and tell his story. Are you planning to do the same with the character of Baron Roger? 

NP: Yes, it will be a film largely in 3D animation, much of which will be reproduced from period archives. The plants featured in the film are modelled in 3D using botanical plates collected between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by Samuel Perrottet among others, a contemporary botanist of the period who is the focus of my research. Part of the film will take place in the setting of Baron Roger's folly, now in ruins, which has been fully scanned in 3D. 

JH: By the way, what was the idea behind this building in the first place, why build it so grandly? 

NP: I think Baron Roger was quite a phenomenon; he really seems to have been quite a megalomaniac! What also needs to be said, and perhaps it hasn't been said, is that these agronomic experiments were generally failures from the point of view of the French authorities. It seems to me that there were only one or two years when it worked. Baron Roger took advantage of this to build himself this château. I think that also highlights the personal motivations and ambitions behind these projects. What I found quite striking about Baron Roger was that he wasn't an agronomist at all. He had nothing to do with agriculture before arriving in Senegal, but when you read his writings you get the impression that he knows everything about the subject. He gives the impression that he could handle the ploughs himself. It's very curious, this sudden passion - and the rapid appearance of this castle testifies to his ambition to get into the history and politics behind the colonial missions.

JH: And why were all these missions essentially failures?

NP: There are many reasons. On the one hand, Senegal has complicated environmental conditions and terrain, which, as I said, discouraged many colonial explorers and administrators from settling there. The Senegal River is salty up to very high levels, so the land is difficult to farm. On the other hand, the colonial project failed because of the idea that the crops would be grown by free men - the slaves were to be replaced by men who would grow the crops of their own free will, according to the colonial authorities, which was not the case. What's more, these experiments took place in Walo territory, the kingdom to the north of Senegal which was then in conflict with the Moors of Trarza. The colonial administration relied heavily on these conflicts between the Walo and the Trarza - the signed treaty was not respected, and after a series of reversals of alliances, the Walo and the Trarza formed an alliance against the French colonists. 

JH: That's what we saw in your first film, in other words, there are moments when we really see the plant as it could be, analysed in a voyeuristic relationship with the plant. Then, all of a sudden, we go from sequences where the plant is static to moments where its movement is restored, but in a totally disordered way. You give them back the power that they have, to a certain extent, been stripped of. 

NP: I think there was a desire to tell the story in such a way that the plants were not just objects in the story, but were seen as characters telling their own version of the story. Re-modelling in 3D allows us to extract them from the botanical board on which they are fixed and transpose them into a digital space where a great deal of movement is possible. And at the same time, there's this whole anthropomorphic projection onto these plants, a totally imaginary projection. It's all part of the question of how to give body and life to these characters. Through animation, I began to control the areas of deformation, how the skeleton would act on the deformation of the plant. By digitally linking the two, glitches occur. It's true that it's very important for me to show all the resistances to this history of agricultural colonisation. On the one hand, let's take the resistance that the plants themselves exerted by refusing to grow and prosper. Symbolically, there's something very strong about this, and there's also all the opposition of the Walo kings and queens to the colonial powers, to the various wars and conflicts, and how this resistance came together, or at any rate, was simultaneous, to ensure the overall failure of the agricultural conquest project. 

JH: In the narrative of this new film, you propose a link between this colonial agricultural history and today's situation in Richard Toll, where the Compagnie Sucrière Sénégalaise is based. Can you tell us about this? 

NP: This link comes from questioning what remains of this history today. What still exists in Richard-Toll and what have these experiments produced? Richard-Toll is still a fairly important agricultural region in Senegal, with several major rice and sugar cane growing and farming projects. The development of these agricultural projects was partly based on experiments carried out in the 19th century, so there is a real continuity in the agricultural history of Richard-Toll. The Compagnie Sucrière Sénégalaise (CSS) operates on more than 9,500 hectares of land and has a significant impact on the region, particularly in terms of water use in Lake Guiers, soil degradation and pollution. CSS is looking for very high yields - and this comes at a price, which nature pays. 

JH: During your visits to Richard-Toll, you met many people - that was one of the aims of your residency, to interview the farmers of Richard-Toll.

NP: Yes, indeed. I met farmers' groups based at Tiago, near Richard-Toll, who grow rice and market garden produce. We talked a lot about farming principles today, how they fit in with the CSS and water management. What does it mean to cultivate land when there is a huge industry nearby that pumps out so much water that it becomes difficult to share this resource? One exchange in particular was very interesting, with Yaya Dia, a retired agronomist from SAED, an organisation that supports farmers in the region in growing rice and market gardening, setting up calendars and pooling farming resources. This former agronomist told me about his arrival at SAED in the 1980s, when he was assigned to the archives for three months. He went through the archives, even those from the time of Baron Roger. He then used this data and information to find out what had gone wrong, to rethink agricultural planning and to improve yields.

JH: So, at one and the same time, there was a colonial hold on the territory and, at the same time, success with the creation of the CSS. So certain cultures really took hold?

NP: It took a century for it to really work, for a whole host of reasons, not least because dams were built on the Senegal River to stop the salt water rising, because there was a lot of experimentation going on. That's also what I discovered during my residency, how the region's agriculture was rebuilt from the 1950s onwards, starting with rice experimentation, which was carried out for a time by state organisations during the colonial era, then by the state after independence, and then passed on to private organisations like CSS. How did we move from a state-run enterprise or project to delegating these crops to private companies that make a lot of money out of it? At the same time, there were experiments with sugar cane. Rice growing was not profitable enough at one point. It was also very interesting to see how the revival of the agricultural project in Richard-Toll was rebuilt in the 1950s. Farming continued, but not with the same issues, not with the same outlook, not by the same people. That's what I found interesting about the transformation of this area. 

Nicolas Pirus will present his next film at Le Fresnoy in September, as part of the study program (Vera Molnár class 2023-2025)