Anne-Laure Franchette
Co-Advisor: Marianne Guarino-Huet, HEAD
Pictures (c) La Becque
This artistic research aims to investigate the role of spontaneous urban vegetation as a living archive of migration, memory, and resistance, with a focus on Rubus Armeniacus (Armenian blackberry). Originating in Western Asia and introduced to Europe through botanical trade, this adaptable plant now thrives in the margins of post-industrial cities; vacant lots, railway edges, and construction sites. These spaces, often overlooked or dismissed as “wastelands,” are ecotones where nature and culture, memory and erasure, intersect. The trans-disciplinary project engages artistic practice as a method of ecological and historical inquiry. By tracing the migration of Rubus Armeniacus across landscapes and temporalities, the project explores how non-human life can trigger forgotten or suppressed family histories, particularly in the context of displacement, diaspora, and redevelopment. Through a combination of site-specific interventions, participatory foraging walks, archival research, and experimental installations, this proposal aims to reposition spontaneous vegetation as a mnemonic agent; one capable of reactivating ancestral narratives and reshaping how we read the contemporary city. Rather than treating such vegetation as invasive or accidental, the research embraces its material, symbolic, and aesthetic potential to bridge personal memory, collective trauma, and urban transformation. Ultimately, the work aims to contribute new models for artistic research that integrate ecological awareness with memory practices and to influence how architects, planners, and artists might attune to the latent histories embedded in feral urban ecologies.