Manuel d’amour environnemental (Environmental Love Manual)is a project realized at the Palais de Tokyo, with support from the inaugural Choi Foundation Prize for Contemporary Art dedicated to the links between contemporary creation and ecology. Taking form as a collection of seventy-two poems, bilingual in French and Chinese, the project muses on the interplay of mind and body with nature and the ways in which the respective internal contradictions of romantic relationships and environmental endeavors serve as metaphors for each other. Contents written about include clouds and mists, foraging in the wild, passion and exhaustion, indulgence and abstinence, biking on ice, herring schools and wild goats, intimacy and nightmare, making of bamboo skis, snow mountain and canyon streams, death at sea, eaten by birds, and many more. Yoann Gourmel, editor of the collection and curator at the Palais de Tokyo commented, “Environmental Love Manual deals with the paradoxes of contemporary urban life in relationship with nature. Humorous, desperate, melancholic, these short poems are ramblings that combine imagination, amusement and disenchantment with the everyday.”
Translated from the Chinese by Shuang Xu.
published in November 2022 bilingual edition (French / Chinese) 14,8 x 24,5 cm (spiral bound) 180 pages
