The commission

In 2019, the Maison de l'enfance et de la famille Métropole Roubaix-Tourcoing (Children and family centre) and the “Garden in the Stars” collective commissioned an artists to promote knowledge transfer and their innovative agricultural techniques in an urban environment.

The artwork

From the Latin calendae "first day of the month". A medium-sized annual plant with bright yellow radiate flower heads and therapeutic properties. Its common name, marigold, comes from the Latin "that follows the sun".

This commission first resulted in Philémon Vanorlé's work Cataplasme, a mobile horticultural tool dedicated to the growing of Calendula officinalis. After an experimental implementation phase, the Cataplasme project developed in the form of a film by Philémon Vanorlé and Justine Pluvinage.

Two teenage girls from Roubaix run away from the Roubaix-Tourcoing Children and family centre taking their worries with them. (Translator’s note: marigold translates as souci in French, which also means a ‘worry’). They set off across the Nord county, towards the coast, on a journey guided by the encounters and the benefits of these plants with their medicinal properties. Along the way, they cherish and disseminate their ‘worries’.
"Halfway between fiction and documentary, this film, in the tradition of road-trip movies, is a journey of initiation into the heart of adolescence". (Philémon Vanorlé and Justine Pluvinage).

The artists

Born in Brussels in 1980, Philémon Vanorlé is Belgian and lives in Lille. His artistic work reveals the comical and sometimes touching absurdity of forms, images and vernacular objects gleaned from or injected into everyday life. Wordplay, misappropriation, displacement and irreverence characterise a body of work that is both poetic and critical. With a doctorate in Visual arts from Paris 1 university, he works under the name Société Volatile and also designs theatre sets and creates performance.

Born in 1983, Justine Pluvinage is an artist-director from Lille. She graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d'Arles in 2009, and from Le Fresnoy, studio national des arts contemporains, with honours in 2015. The artist has made a number of videos, short films and feature-length documentaries that reveal snippets of intimacy, confidences and sensory experiences.