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Camille Mutel unfolds her new creation, The Salt of Life, around the singular and fragile nature of a unique territory: the Seille Valley (57). Far from the coast, it shelters springs, ponds, resurgences, and salt meadows with immense richness in flora and fauna, some of which are threatened with extinction.

 

Seeing the progressive erasure of the landscape and its inevitable transformation, the artist questions what "dying invisible" means for each species - whether plant, animal, or human.

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She partners with culinary designer Céline Pelcé to imagine a gestural and culinary ceremony in which guests are invited to literally nourish themselves from this landscape. They offer a sensory experience together close to ritual, in which food is buried, dug up, or reduced to ashes. While spring water traces a fleeting furrow along a rock salt stone, the overripe fruit - embalmed by the hands of one or the other artist - takes shape for one last time in the mouths and memories of the guests gathered here.

 

As a preamble to this creation, a long and rich documentary project is unfolding across various sites. Camille Mutel, accompanied by the photographer Katherine Longly, author Caroline Simonin, and set designer Violette Graveline, conduct fieldwork. They visit cemeteries, as well as the Lorraine Regional Natural Park, which lists endangered species in the Seille Valley. They partner with the Collective for the Deceased on the Street, which ensures the dignity of funerals for homeless people. They collect words, images, and objects that represent the absent and record the unique gestures of those they accompany. The portrait of these invisible dead who populate our lives emerges. The yellow-bellied toad, Artemia salina, or "an unidentified man in a homeless situation," who died in October 2024 in the center of Strasbourg. Each of them will be given a unique place in the culinary and gestural ceremony that will take place in spring 2027.

 

Between poetry and documentary, this show, inspired by funeral banquets, aims to resist indifference. It brings the deceased to life, allows us to say "their presence would have made a difference," and allows us to feel that it is together that we stand. In this third installment of a quadrilogy that explores the Place of the Other and gesture as what connects us to them, Camille Mutel stages the ephemeral and invites us to taste the salt of life...

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