HUTS, INSIDE OUTSIDE

C@b@nes, dedans-dehors

The forest is engraved in our unconscious collective, it gives their broad topics to the tales and legends with the witches, the giants, the wolves and man-eaters.
The tree is the essential component and one recognizes to him since always various roles: the tree lung, tree heat, tree medicine and tree manufacturer.
The trees were very used in the world for construction; and on our territory in the middle of the forests of production of the High-Moor, one meets walks sometimes randomly a singular habitat: THE HUT.

The hut is one of the origins of architecture. The man, only in nature, after being themselves sheltered under a tree or in a cave, would have imagined its first refuge by assembling some branches. This vernacular construction would have inspired it to design more complex buildings. The hut is thus an element of union between the men and their environment.
In the department of the Moors it is the culture of the pine which generated the proliferation of these “huts of wood”. These modest constructions and which wanted to be provisional existed only by the particular destination for which they had been conceived.
These huts were places of rest, life and today of the places of memory belonging to the regional inheritance.
“To live in hut” in the middle of the forest, it is to testify to a new practice of the space to living, by which inside and outside communicate, instead of being excluded. A space with a constant exposure of oneself, with the others and with-outside; an awakening in catch with what surrounds us (feeling of danger or sympathy).
More than one simple shelter, the hut is thus an element of union between the men and their environment. This reflection falls under the continuity of initiated work two years ago, heading “LANDES-@RT” by which the pupils accompanied by the photographer Landais JEAN HINCKER had presented a new evocation of the territory and its landscapes.


Today, of new last year secondary school students Bac Pro Management and Control of the Logging Sites propose to bring a new stone to this photographic of the territory by centering their work on a singular habitat but emblematic testimony of the department of the Moors: “huts of wood” (huts of résiniers, palombières, tons, gabions etc…).
This photographic and plastic work will be the second shutter of a “trilogy” thought around three axes: landscape, the habitat of the forests and populations.
Quite naturally, we solicited the photographer-plastics technician again landais JEAN HINCKER, in order to continue our LANDES-@rt series in a coherent way. Our “plastic” approach largely influenced by the artistic current Land Art of the Sixties remains the “discussion thread” of this new series but it will require upstream catches of sight, an enormous prospection, investigation, research task on the territory near the local populations, of the services of animation of the General advice of the Moors as well as Regional natural park of the Moors of Gascogne.

The objective of this artistic project will be of course to find “inhabited” huts, which means that we will be delayed on habitats presenting of the characteristics, a singularity, in short a “heart” thanks to their architecture, with their owners or their direct environment. We will not fail to translate these specificities by new technologies. Numeric photography, the image processing with software PHOTOSHOP will be in the middle of the realization of this exposure which obviously could have a double reading: that of ethno-photographic testimony and that of the plastic approach of architecture fitting in Land Article.
Will this set of themes of the hut and its architecture make it possible to question us on the function and the utility of these old habitats and very “current”, and to ask us which hut the children dream today? A hut Internet? Which are the new contexts where to build it? Or which are the materials of the hut of the 21st century? …
This second shutter of the LANDES-@rt series will be the result of a reflection carried out by the pupils with JEAN HINCKER and these “huts of wood” will be in turn an escape from the daily newspaper, a fold on oneself, one moment of dream, an escape in the imaginary one, but especially and thanks to this meeting between young foresters and the artist, the crossing of art and technique…

Catherine Stons, Professor Sociocultural Education at the Roger-Duroure agricultural college of SABER, Landes, France, 2009