In September 2025, we presented Damien Mousseau’s exhibition Odyssée en terre agricole. The exhibition sought to address, through photography, our relationship with agriculture – with the industry that produces and transforms the food we eat, and with the way it also shapes the landscape around us.
Alongside the exhibition, we hosted the Magic Carpets residency, continuing this line of enquiry and reflecting on how art can challenge our relationship to food – its production and its consumption.
We welcomed Nordine Sajot, a visual artist based in Rome, on a proposal from Latitudo Art Projects. Nordine’s work – a multifaceted reflection on food as a language – engaged with the farming and activist communities of our region to create two collective works: Ex-voto against war and Land-scape.
Ex-voto against war
Ex-voto against war is a research project developed over several years by Nordine Sajot around the gestures of eating as a form of body language within our collective memory.
In Nantes, she created a new part of this series using images of food distribution in Gaza, which she then cut out and pasted onto the walls of the space provided by the Bonus workshops. This installation questioned food as a political weapon of domination – more specifically here, the deprivation of food.
We invited members of the Solidarité France Palestine association, as well as Palestinian refugees, to transform this work together. The six participants discussed with the artist what meals mean for individuals and for societies: in Palestine, and in the Muslim tradition more generally, sharing a meal is an important communal moment, allowing people to come together and talk. It is also a symbol of generosity and abundance. Thus, depriving the Palestinian population of food is also a form of humiliation.
These exchanges also focused on family recipes and memories, in particular a Palestinian dish, maqlouba – an upside-down rice and vegetable meal that is a ritual involving specific gestures, tying in with Nordine’s exploration of eating gestures.
Workshop participants were then invited to contribute to the photographs by adding words or phrases of their choice, placed wherever they wished, in order to create a resonance between words and gestures. The photographs were later removed from the walls and reassembled to form a large carpet – a central element in Muslim cultures, where meals are eaten. Collectively, we wished to convey these messages and gestures through a borderless carpet, one that could continue to be enriched by new exchanges and new gestures.
In keeping with the spirit of conviviality conveyed by the work, we shared a meal prepared from Italian–Palestinian products.
Land-scape
At the same time, Nordine Sajot met farmers during a workshop with Commun’île, a cooperative that grows organic vegetables and transforms them into dishes in its restaurants. The chefs and farmers are employees working together on a resilient food project.
She spent a week on their farm, Les Landes Fertiles in Corcoué-sur-Logne (south of Nantes), working with two farmers, Anaïs and Elia – harvesting vegetables, weeding, and preparing the market stall. Working closely with the produce enabled her to understand how this organic farm operates, the challenges facing the region, and the daily lives of these women farmers.
She then took part in a workshop with two cooks from the cooperative, Mathilde and Jean, to devise recipes for an edible sculpture to be presented on 11 September at the opening of Damien Mousseau’s exhibition of photographs of farmers. The idea was to reproduce a plot of land, with its different layers, on a metal base made for the occasion. This “edible” piece of land formed part of a view of the landscape in relation to Damien Mousseau’s photographs. Several preliminary meetings and discussions were held between Nordine and Damien so that each could understand the other’s artistic approach.
The edible plot of land, Land-scape, was conceived by Nordine and the chefs on the basis of Damien’s photographs, which question our relationship with the land and with the agriculture that shapes the landscape. We see these landscapes constantly passing by on the side of the road, yet we rarely know what goes on there. How are the grains and vegetables that end up on our plates grown? How are the animals we eat raised? What crops are being grown, and what are the issues behind land use? For consumers, there is often a disconnect between the soil and the plate.
Land-scape was therefore an edible artistic proposal that put the earth back at the centre of the plate. Guests were invited to taste the “earth”, made from vegetables grown on the Landes Fertiles farm – green beans, cherry tomatoes, courgettes, pumpkin, and beetroot.
During the presentation at the Centre Claude Cahun, Land-scape was tasted by around 70 guests, surrounded by photographs by Damien Mousseau. It became a highlight of conviviality, bringing together the participants of the Ex-voto against war workshop and connecting the different moments of the residency around a shared meal – reaffirming the role of food in social cohesion, not as a political weapon of destruction but as a force of construction and sharing.
Curatorial text by Juliette Persilier