As part of the European Heritage Days, the Museum of Fine Arts invites the team of the project «Chromoculture: cultivating colour through art and design» to design a participatory exhibition around plant colour.
Chromoculture is a research-creation project led by the École Nationale Supérieure d'Art de Limoges. It aims to promote and enhance sustainable colour practices in art and design by creating a garden-laboratory in the school’s park, specialized in natural dyes for its textile, ceramic and publishing workshops.
The project was born from a twofold observation. The cultural and natural environment of Ensa-Limoges is paradoxically marked, since its creation in 1881, by rurality (Limousin) and polluting and energy-consuming practices of dyeing (for the tapestry factories of Aubusson) and enamel (for the Limoges porcelain industry). Gardens, botany and plants are a growing source of inspiration for contemporary artistic and design practices.
By combining a methodology based on simplified cultivation techniques and the gathering of wild plants; landscaping; eco-pedagogy and research-creation, Chromoculture aims to rethink, for the 21st century, new relationships between gardening, art, design and color, to question the capacity of art and design to accompany the ecological changes of contemporary societies and thus to deploy new ethics and aesthetics of color.
Throughout the weekend, the exhibition of the project is accompanied by an artistic and cultural program (workshops, conference, urban walk) animated by the artists, designers and researchers of Chromoculture.