For about a month, from mid November to mid December 2023, Delphine stays at Riwanua, Makassar to prepare on writing the last chapter of her PhD thesis in design and architectural studies. While doing it, she is also spending time by eating, hanging-out, learning basic Bahasa Indonesia, sharing, talking, making garden and composing a mural, presenting her stories as a European and travelling to Enrekang for 5 days with Riwanua to meet people and to find the Nasu Cemba and the steamed Mandoti rice. During the travel to Enrekang, Delpine also starts to work with Reza Enem, a Makassar based sound artist and a musician to compose an audio-visual work that will be presented in 2024. At the last day in Makassar before leaving to Japan, coincidentally, she also welcomes the Ambassador of France and director of Institut Français Indonésie who visit Riwanua for lunch and discussing about the real future collaboration between Riwanua and the people of France
Delphine Hyvrier is an artist and a PhD candidate in arts, architecture and design in the Jean Monnet Université and ESADSE, in Saint-Etienne, France. She studied design and cultural geography in Sorbonne and Paris 8 Vincennes while working as a gardener in the Special School for Free Spaces and in the art residency center Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers. Those experiences made her focus on the ways nature is depicted and interpreted according to different social groups and researches in places where the notion of nature is non-consensual, reveals social fractures and power struggles.
Since 2019, she studies the invention of the occidental way of living and its cultural and ecological consequences in France since the 50’s by analysing how autarcic farmers communities from french Guiana (Kourou) and Alps (Tignes) were evicted to create major modern projects, such as the European Spaceport or the biggest dam in post-war Europe. Through interviews, archives, academic materials she tries try to recount how these communities were forced to change their ways of living: how was it justified by French state, what were the languages, analysis and methods used by the architects and ingeneers to modernize those places, how urban planning and architecture prevented the farmers to pursue their activities and cultures, how their relation to nature and to their communities changed. The whole process documentate the vivid inheritage of white supremacy rooted in modern architecture.
Her articles have been published in journals such as Design, Arts and Medias, Azimuts or Les Carnets du Paysage. She organized two study days dedicated to young researchers and creators focusing on ecological issues and environmental justice and attended seminars and conferences to present her doctoral work (What Architecture does to Ecology, Rouen 2023, Detroit Acts of Urbanism 2022, Canari Effect, Saint-Petersburg 2020, Expanding the Arts Zurich 2020).
Delphine took part and organized serveral exhibitions in France and abroad. Among others: Transplantations, was a collective exhibition dealing with the stories of uprooted farmers communities and was organized in a south-eastern french organic poultry farm in June 2023; Manger, Dormir, Communiquer, (eating sleeping communicating) was created with her fellow of the CyDRE lab in Saint-Etienne for the Milano Design Week in 2023 and advertised for the concept post-innovation design by proposing to the visitors nap workshops, emotion-telling performances or free herbal tea; Wild Mountains Retarded Peasants; in TEM-Press, 2022, in Saint-Etienne displayed her researches on a mountain village drowned for the purposes of a dam as a fake rural museum; Inside Production, for the Saint-Etienne international Design Biennale of 2022, displayed her works on the inhabitant’s histories on the coal mines of Saint-Etienne.