Sensitive

Pont, August 2020.

After two or three days of relaxing walks in the Morvan natural park, we are not really surprised to come across this sign. By qualifying the place as a “sensitive natural space”, it seems to fit perfectly with the efforts of an ecology that respecifies the dubious idea of “nature” by translating it into the terms of a situated sensibility. Rather than becoming a foreign spectator of a natural world from which he or she has gradually extracted himself or herself, the human being has much to gain by reconnecting with a living world whose richness and diversity he or she must learn to perceive anew.
Actually, on closer inspection, the panel does a little more than qualifying the place. The three key words are underlined with an ink that was added after its installation, and a cursive writing made of this same ink is deployed around the official information. “Less cypress. Less beech. Leafy trees are dying for pine plantations…”. Almost erased, the words sharpen the eyes and do a good job of raising awareness. Take a good look: not all trees make the same forest. And where you might be tempted to see only “nature” there are confrontations, battles that result in deaths. The green ink fading in the sun ultimately offers a beautiful lesson: to make yourself sensitive to this politics that unfolds on the ground, you sometimes have to squint your eyes and decipher alternative texts that have almost been erased.