"Vivre le végétal en ville" exhibition opening

Join the opening of the "Vivre le végétal en ville à Dakar, Ìbàdàn, Porto-Novo, Yaoundé" ("Living with Plants in Dakar, Ìbàdàn, Porto-Novo, and Yaoundé") at the Humathèque (Paris), on 18 December. This research-creation event marks the closing of our INFRAPATRI project, headed by former IFRA-Nigeria Deputy-Director, Dr Emilie Guitard. This exhibition explores the rich relationships between inhabitants and trees in four major African cities by bringing together the writing and art of photographers, film makers, visual artists and social science researchers produced as part of the INFRAPATRI project.

Register for the opening and read the program here.

Exhibition

Working together from the field surveys onwards, artists and researchers jointly report on the diversity of knowledge and uses relating to urban plants, demonstrating the “infra-heritage” relationship between city dwellers and trees and plants in the city. This everyday knowledge and these practices (for subsistence, culinary, medicinal, ritual, and memorial purposes) are rarely recognized by public actors, in a context of intense land pressure and real estate speculation. As vehicles for social ties and transmission practices, they nevertheless contribute to the preservation of plants in cities, on the fringes of official policies on heritage and urban nature conservation.

The exhibition “Vivre le végétal en ville à Dakar, Ìbàdàn, Porto-Novo, Yaoundé” will allow visitors to grasp the multiplicity of relationships and attachments to plants in cities and the issues of recognition, preservation, and transmission associated with them, in African urban contexts that are still little understood from this perspective.

Date

The exhibition will be accessible at the Humathèque, from 18 December 2025 to 8 March 2026.

Tags: heritage