Décharge chic [Classy Dump] (2022-2023)

Project led by the PETR Grand Quercy in partnership with Juin Jardins
With the support of the Regional Department of Cultural Affairs Occitanie

In collaboration with Léon Gambetta Middle School, the Cahors greenhouses and Gamm Vert

Created for the Cahors Juin Jardins Festival 2023, Classy Dump is grounded in the concept of post-nature—the understanding of nature as inseparable from human activity, continuously shaped and transformed through centuries of intervention. Nathalie Rey proposes a “resilient garden” where vegetation grows amidst plastic waste collected from a private dump, forming a paradoxical and poetic landscape that stages the disappearance of so-called “natural” nature.

Through a sculptural arrangement of straw bales, agricultural nets and fleshy flowers, the artist translates visually the confusion between the living and the synthetic, between beauty and waste. Her “garden” denies the existence of an ideal, romantic nature and instead reveals the radical hybridity of our contemporary environments.

In parallel, Rey developed Crazy Garden with students from Léon Gambetta Middle School. This participatory project extends the same reflection, inviting the students to create hybrid compositions that mix natural and artificial elements. Using found objects, homemade flowers and living plants, the students explored questions of pollution, creativity and the collective imagination of landscape.The entire process was made possible thanks to the collaboration of the Cahors greenhouses and Gamm Vert, who assisted in selecting and growing flowers and organized gardening workshops for the children. This network of exchange, learning and generosity grounds the work in a communal dynamic, where creation becomes a shared gesture of care and reinvention of the living.