Land art on ECT sites
Land art aims to reconcile art and nature. Land art artists create a dialogue between their imaginations and natural spaces. ECT sites lend themselves to this creativity.
The various land art projects carried out on ECT sites are the fruit of encounters with artists intrigued by our worksites, challenged by the transformation of the sites that takes place, by the nobility of the excavated materials.
ECT supports their approach, which gives new meaning to our developments and takes a symbolic look at excavated earth from the construction industry.
Antoine Grumbach's Oeil du Ciel at ECT's Villeneuve-sous-Dammartin site
A work of land art using earth as material
ECT wanted an exceptional layout for its largest excavated soil reclamation site in Villeneuve-sous-Dammartin (77). So we asked Antoine Grumbach to design a large-scale project. With earth as a material.
This will be the land art and aerial art work “Les Yeux du Ciel”: 2 eyes 400 meters long, inscribed in the site. The work can be seen from the air by planes from the nearby Roissy CDG airport. It will become a landscaped park, surrounded by fields and open to the public, when the ECT site closes.
The western eye is completed. Earthworks began in May 2022, and were completed in spring 2023 with the planting of the iris and surrounding trees. Construction of L’Œil Est will start in 2025.
Antoine Grumbach is an architect, urban planner and artist. He was awarded the Grand Prix de l’Urbanisme in 1992.
A symbol of man's link between heaven and earth
The President of ECT and his team expressed their enthusiasm for this
Aerial Art project. In keeping with the site’s unusual proportions,
a major project was needed. He called for a twofold dimension for the Yeux-du-Ciel: the temporary dimension of hosting events, combined with a permanent vocation focused on the two irises illustrating mankind’s links between heaven and earth.
Antoine Grumbach – Les Yeux du Ciel – 2019
SAYPE's ephemeral fresco in Annet-sur-Marne
A humanist and environmental message
In 2021, in Annet-sur-Marne, 35 km from Paris, artist Saype has added another episode to his “Human Story” series. These imposing, ephemeral frescoes depict men, women and children in grandiose landscapes, delivering a universal message.
Entitled “un jeu d’enfant?”, this 3,500 m2 work once again illustrated the artist’s humanist and environmental concerns.
Entitled “un jeu d’enfant?”, this new 3,500 m2 work once again illustrates the artist’s humanist and environmental concerns.
Street art and land art, in the heart of a suburban landscape
By inviting Saype to Annet-sur-Marne, where Vasarely, the pope of optical abstraction, had his studio, ECT wanted to offer the town the chance to join forces with an internationally renowned artistic gesture.
Drawing on the codes of street and land art, Saype’s work blends into the landscape of the Paris region, which is itself a hybrid of agricultural and urban landscapes.
A work that echoes the circular economy of urban land
Saype worked on a former wasteland rehabilitated by ECT using soil excavated from nearby construction sites. This soil has been used to develop the site, making it part of a circular economy approach.
The reconstituted floor has become the canvas on which the artist expresses himself. For some of the pigments in the work, Saype created a base from earths supplied by ECT. Crushed and colored, these urban soils have become the artist’s palette.
“In a world where the human footprint has been steadily expanding for decades, and where humans have also always shaped their environment, the issue of reusing excavated soil is nevertheless poorly understood. This is what sparked my curiosity, and led me to create this work. Should we drastically curb our devastating expansion? Should we find alternative ways of shaping our landscapes? My work is not intended to provide a solution to this problem, but to point out an issue that doesn’t seem to me to be sufficiently highlighted. I also like the idea of bringing art to a place where it’s not expected. As children, many of us have played with bulldozers in sandboxes, yet there’s no clear answer to this problem, because if it were that simple, it would just be “child’s play…”.
SAYPE – Annet-sur-Marne, September 2021
Stefan Shakland's research - EXPERIMENTERRE
Stefan Shankland is a visual artist committed to urban transformation and the recycling of building materials. Invited to take up a 6-month residency at ECT in 2023, Stefan Shankland explored the artistic possibilities of “excavated earth” as a material.
This artist residency took place as part of the “Magnétiques Résidences” program, in partnership with Paris Île-de-France Capitale Économique and DRAC Île-de-France.
The deep earth is always below the threshold of visibility: beneath our feet, behind the dike, on the other side of the construction palisades closed to the public, beyond the horizon, covered forever by a layer of topsoil.
The invisibility, incommensurability and lack of representation of the soil excavated by the GPExpress is in line with other monumental subjects that are just as fundamental and just as invisible: urban metabolism, the city of flows, the metropolis of infrastructures, the invisible mountains of construction waste, the Anthropocene that is shaping the landscape and the world…
Stefan Shankland – Experimenterre
Your most frequently asked questions
On Sunday September 24, 2023, the ECT site in Villeneuve-sous-Dammartin (77) exceptionally opened its doors for an outdoor escape game. An opportunity for the public to discover the land art work, “L’Œil du Ciel”, designed by Antoine Grumbach and produced by ECT. Earthworks and planting of the second Eye are scheduled for 2025. The site will open its doors to the public at the end of the excavated soil reclamation operation in 2027.
The artist Saype has taken up residence in Annet-sur-Marne (77), on a site rehabilitated by ECT, to create his new lad art work. This ephemeral, eco-responsible fresco entitled “Un jeu d’enfant?” was painted in 3 days using pigments derived from excavated soil. This fresco is no longer visible: it has faded naturally with the weather and the regrowth of ground vegetation. A sign has been installed on the site to commemorate this emblematic achievement.
“Les Yeux du Ciel” is located on the ECT site in Villeneuve-sous-Dammartin, Seine et Marne (77).
It’s a work of land art and aerial art imagined by Antoine Grumbach and created by the ECT company as part of the landscaping for its excavated earth reclamation site. In 2023, L’Œil Ouest was completed by ECT, after 6 months of earthworks and planting. It is visible to air travellers from the nearby Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport. Work on the second eye is scheduled to start in 2025.
