Léa Collet — Jardins Partagés, 2026

The installation Jardins Partagés (“Shared Gardens”) by Léa Collet takes as its starting point the Jardin Rosa Mir. It was created by the Spanish artisan and anarchist Jules Senis Mir, who fled Spain during the Civil War and settled in Lyon’s Croix-Rousse district. After vowing to create a garden if he recovered from cancer, he devoted the last twenty-five years of his life to its construction (1957–1983). With its shell-encrusted columns, stone arches and cascading succulents and flowering plants, the garden is dedicated to his mother, Rosa Mir Mercader and the Virgin Mary. Collet spent time with children and older residents from the neighbourhood, gathering memories of gardens and plants through workshops, some held at the Jardin, that combined storytelling, drawing and sculpture. A rhizomatic metal structure brings together a film documenting the group’s intergenerational process of building a common garden archive and sculptures of imaginary plants developed with artificial intelligence during the workshops.
The project also engages with the unpublished archives of Gustave Humbert (1896–1973), gardener and collector of succulents and cacti, discovered during her residency at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, where the artist also worked with a group of secondary school students. An AI trained on this never- published manuscript generates new hybrid species, 3D-printed and integrated into the installation. Jardins Partagés was born from two residencies rooted in their territories: an intergenerational production in Lyon as part of the Biennale de Lyon, and a school-based residency with the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco.

Science fiction permeates Léa Collet’s practice. Through film, installation and performance, the artist constructs environments in which the boundaries between natural and human, physical and technological, tend to dissolve. Her work brings into relation different forms of intelligence – vegetal, technological and human – without hierarchy. Within these hybrid spaces, forms blur and transform: vegetation connects to screens, while figures evolve in landscapes suspended between the living and the artificial, shaped by what the artist describes as “augmented affectivity.”