Installed on the île de la Pépinière, this creation by the artist Nicolas Fenouillat consists of a line of five posts over four metres high: they are planted in the ground at two metre intervals, and form a straight line across the area… “in sympathy” with the surroundings. Here the artist is adopting a concept dear to the philosopher Michel Foucault, that of sympathy, “which promotes the movement of things in the world and encourages the coming together of the most distant, it attracts heavy things to the heaviness of the ground, and light things to the weightless ether; it pushes roots towards the water, and makes the great yellow sunflower turn with the passage of the sun.  So the larch columns erected by Nicolas Fenouillat become l’Axis Mundi, an axis which supports the celestial vault and provides a link with the terrestrial globe. At their tips, drumsticks are sculpted out of the tree trunk itself, forming slim extensions of untreated wood. At a precise moment of the day, the sun comes into line and touches the Aends of these antennae. The île de la Pépinière, the centre of the world and a connection point between the earth and the sky?

Born in 1978, Nicolas Fenouillat is a graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Montpellier. He then enrolled at the École du Magasin in Grenoble. He is a visual artist, performer and drummer with the NED group, whose work maintains a constant relationship with music, leading him to collaborate both with poets and choreographers. He has participated in various collective exhibitions in France and abroad, and at the same time, tours with his group NED in Europe and the United States. Nicolas Fenouillat is selected for the Art, cities & landscape project in King’s Lynn, England