By the end of the training, participants will have assimilated:

• The ability to envision «nature» in a comprehensive way and with greater empathy
• Understanding the ecological challenges of our time
• The application of new field experiences lived with the artist to their artistic practice
• Introduction to stereophonic sound recording and initiation to binaural recording: a recording method that aims to replicate the natural human auditory perception

Being on the lookout for the wild: observing with our ears, seeing with our imagination. During the training, participants will meet the artist and « hunter-gatherer » Erik Samakh.

They will explore his practice and his method of reading a natural or artificial environment in a wooded park, aided by photographic tools such as camera traps or hunting cameras and «treestands, » elevated seats allowing observation from trees up to 5 meters high.

The participants will explore the site with the artist, and after visiting the locations, cameras and observation points will be set up along animal trails.

Similarly, treestands will be used to observe animals at dusk. In the twilight, the world around us transforms, our ears become guides, and our eyes transmit to our brains images reflecting our imagination.

Similar to meditation, observation in complete stillness allows us to truly blend into the landscape and perceive «nature» with a fresh perspective.

Our relationship with the «wild» is crucial, complex, and as diverse as we ourselves can be, as discussed in Charles Stépanoff’s «L’animal et la mort» (The Animal and Death) published by La Découverte, social sciences of the living.

Erik Samakh hunter-gatherer visual artist

Erik Samakh is a graduate of ENSA Cergy. Professor of the National Schools of Art since 1989, he has taught in numerous art schools. He lives and works in the Hautes-Pyrénées on an area of 20 hectares which has today become a veritable animal and plant laboratory and conservatory. This site where bees, bamboos, frogs and green lizards coexist is a source of daily inspiration, a space for capturing images, recording sound and experimenting.

Through the combination of discreet technologies and natural phenomena of plant or animal origin, Erik Samakh invites the viewer to be attentive to nature, to listen to it and to dialogue with it.

As a true pioneer of new media in the 1980s, he was invited to art biennials and festivals and has since exhibited in numerous art centers, international museums and historical monuments.

His artistic approach is mainly based today in natural spaces thanks to renewable energies.

• Workshops equipped with professional machines, classrooms, multipurpose room
• Supply of materials
• Conference
• Educational distribution: 80% practical, 20% theoretical contributions
• Active participation and experimentation of participants are favored
• Camera traps brought by the artist and a chair
• Camera traps and viewing chair provided by the campus
• The images obtained, photos and videos, can serve as basic material and will be common and shared.

• Individual and group interviews
• Design file to be produced (framework provided)
• End of training self-assessment
• Collective restitution
• Payroll sheet per half day
• Certificate of completion issued by Campus MaNa