What the surveyor owes to the rock is an installation-performance created by Feda Wardak. It takes place along the Route de Ferney, on a wooded thicket destined to disappear to allow the passage of the future Tram des Nations. Rather than a critique of this public transport project, the installation questions the notion of citizen consultation often implemented in the context of development projects.
The installation undertakes to transform the existing landscape. It takes the form of a block of concrete that pierces the landscape for several tens of metres, creating a new cross path to the Route de Ferney. The installation and the musical performance associated with it act as an urban provocation and prefigure uses linked to the construction of the new tramway line. In general, when public action establishes a relationship between inhabitants and public spaces around urban development issues, it is hard to escape the classic consultation process. Here, the artistic work seizes on certain expressions used within the framework of the Tram des Nations consultation (“piercing the landscape”, “creating transversalities”, “direct participation”, “crossing space”, “towards a greener city”, etc.) to give them reality in a fictional story.
The story is based on a consultation led by a surveyor with the Stones of Niton, rocks embedded in Lake Geneva. Rather than positioning the “inhabitant” in a process of acceptance of an infrastructural project already developed upstream, the mineral here (interpreted by the musician and performer Jackson Thélémaque) gives the artist a direct right to act, embodied by a surveyor (played by Feda Wardak).
The aim is to raise questions about how to define a common landscape. This landscape does not only take into account an environmental ecology, but it also summons social and political ecologies.
