TOMMASO MOLA MEREGALLI

During a four-week residency, Tommaso Mola Meregalli, architect, photographer and curator produced a small photographic project on the theme of bifurcation. Since the beginning, he thought it was important to deal not only with what was happening inside the domaine’s park, but also with the surrounding territories, in the deeply rural world in which Boisbuchet is located. As he drove, biked and walked along the roads and through the villages, he wondered how to represent and summarize such a picturesque agricultural landscape as the Vienne.

After taking the wrong road several times at perfectly symmetrical forks, he realised how these infrastructural nodes tell, with a certain specificity, the scattered dimension of the farms, the absence of a hierarchical road structure and the size of the agricultural plots. Photographing an elementary form of architecture seemed to him an interesting strategy to represent the whole territory.

The image of the crossroads then brought him in different directions. In particular, he insisted on a group of apple trees a few steps away from the castle. The tangle of unpruned branches facing downwards under the load of small fruit, on the one hand reminded him visually of the maps of this region, and on the other made him think back to a graduation speech made a few years ago by a group of students from a Parisian agro-technical school. Claiming the need to find a new way of farming, alternative to the intensive and destructive one of capitalism, they were inviting their peers to make different choices and question the role that society expected them to play. The verb they used for this new attitude was “bifurquer”.