A bird flies from hand. The others a sleep in the little cotton bags.


La Scamandre Reserve Wetlands.

VIII.  LAST LINE OF DEFENSE

#32 A crisis of the real guardians
Researchers, artists are the lookouts for the places that are most important to us. They devote their night and morning hours time to counting species manually and defending natural areas, also legally. At the end of the day, it's becoming difficult to get down to earth, to the core of the work. I've also felt the same in industry, culture and politics, as if our taks are constantly taking off into the sky.

  #33 The perception of things
Despite its productivity, the deltanians do not have the means to defend themselves against the incursion they suffer. We are pushing our guardians to defend themselves within a zoned and virtualised vision of the landscape. The industries do not have the necessary tests and procedures to check that the interaction with our habitat is healthy. To put it simply, those who plan and participate in the production do not project themselves into the habitat they are instrument.

#34 Looking up
The deltas are at the forefront of climate collapse, causing political friction. Man perceives water as frightening and fences as reassuring. Our escape route is vertical: gigantic dykes, fences and barbed wire,
the incinerator of the city of Marseille in neighboring Fos, energy installations,
XXL logistics platforms and new cultural meeting places.

#35 To apprehension
Fos is the most densely populated oil pipeline in the Mediterranean.
I'm not seeing the same reaction as the people of Mississippi and Standing Rock, who danced, sang and shouted in protest against these invasions. The thirty thousand music lovers who came to a rave here on the plain of the Crau unfortunately failed to see the complex fragility that was under their feet.
Yet intension brings hope.

#36 Our inner torments
Sometimes a different view is justified. When I use the word 'delta', for example, I often get a quizzical look from those I have named 'deltanian' - I have to explain to him that he lives in a delta, a rivermount, one that moves.
Similarly, when I rotate our continent from with one turn to the right, we can see again. The rivers coming from the mountains appear more clearly. And when a  newspaper from my own lowlands up north writes about the programme for the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie (RIP) in Arles, in the low lands here south, "Sex, God and Violence reign here", I ask myself, in the grip of my own torments: is art capable of shaking up the imaginations in our inner selves?