Arbres à Palabres situates itself at the crossroads of architecture, ecology, and social testimony. In this installation, reclaimed eucalyptus poles—normally used as temporary formwork on construction sites—are reconfigured into a symbolic forest. Their presence carries several layers of meaning: they evoke the fragility of Madagascar’s ecosystems, the violence of extraction, but also the possibility of renewal through reuse.
My installation draws on a lineage of artists and architects who work with humble, site-born materials to reimagine ecological and social narratives. The reuse of eucalyptus poles parallels the approach of Francis Kéré, whose structures often transform locally available timber into spaces of community and reflection. It resonates with Tadashi Kawamata’s interventions, where reclaimed construction wood becomes temporary forests, nests, and architectures of fragility. The political weight of reused chantier materials also echoes Ibrahim Mahama’s monumental installations that give new meaning to discarded industrial elements. These references form an open conversation rather than a direct citation: they offer a vocabulary through which my own context—Madagascar’s ecological precarity, its forestry histories, and its everyday material realities—can be voiced through the simplest of elements. What emerges is a forest built not from ideal forms but from the lived residues of construction, labor, and hope.
The work speaks to the material ethics of Francis Kéré, whose architecture honors local knowledge and elevates modest materials to structures of dignity and communal gathering. Like Kéré’s reinterpretation of the palaver tree as a space of democratic exchange, this installation turns the worksite pole into a vertical witness, a conduit for collective memory.I was deeply influenced by Alejandro Aravena’s 2016 Venice Biennale, where he built the entire exhibition using debris and discarded materials from the previous year’s Architecture Biennale. Aravena, known for his work with Elemental and his commitment to social, incremental, and participatory architecture, has long argued that the profession must confront scarcity, rethink resources, and address the social and environmental realities of the built world rather than hide behind aesthetics or formal experimentation. His curatorship at Venice made this position unmistakable. By choosing to reuse waste—metal studs, timber offcuts, plastic panels, insulation residues—he exposed the Biennale’s own invisible footprint and confronted the architectural world with the uncomfortable truth of its material excess.
What struck me was not only the radical simplicity of the gesture, but the way it turned leftover matter into a narrative device: a physical argument about responsibility, extraction, and the backstage labor of construction. It was a reminder that the architect is never neutral, that the materials we specify carry histories, violences, and ecologies with them. Aravena’s work demonstrated that debris is not merely a by-product of building—it is evidence. It documents the systems we rely on, the industries we sustain, and the environmental debts we accumulate.
That approach stayed with me. It showed that the residues of building sites are not just leftovers—they can become structures of meaning, carriers of memory, and catalysts for critical reflection. They can also open a dialogue about who benefits and who pays the ecological and social cost of construction. In many ways, Aravena’s stance helped me understand that reuse is not only a technical solution but a political and pedagogical act.
This installation follows that lineage. By using eucalyptus poles, chantier scraps, charcoal, and recycled paper, it seeks to reveal rather than conceal the material realities behind our buildings. It asks what our footprint is, not just in terms of carbon, but in terms of ecosystems disrupted, forests cut, and invisible labor absorbed. It suggests that what we usually discard can become a place for awareness, dialogue, and reimagining—and that architecture, like Aravena proposed, can begin by acknowledging the truth of its own waste before it attempts to change the world.”
Paulo Freire taught us that any transformative pedagogy must begin with the concrete, with the lived world, with what he called “reading the world before reading the word.” In that spirit, the eucalyptus formwork poles of this installation—ordinary, damaged, disposable—become more than salvaged chantier elements. They are instruments for reading the ecological and social footprint of construction: cycles of extraction, the invisible labor of workers, the lives of trees entangled with our built environments. They turn material reality into a text that visitors must decipher.
Freire believed that education emerges from dialogue, from critical inquiry, and from an encounter with the real. His work in Brazil and beyond, particularly Pedagogy of the Oppressed, insisted that knowledge should never flow one-way from expert to passive learner, but circulate horizontally through shared experience and collective questioning. Inspired by this, the installation extends its pedagogical dimension through simple, low-impact tools: QR codes printed on tiny scraps of recycled architecture paper become “leaves” that guide visitors toward testimonies, field voices, and lived expertise.
Rather than relying on heavy wall texts or authoritative panels, these modest fragments enact Freire’s vision of accessible, participatory education. They invite curiosity rather than obedience. They encourage visitors to assemble meaning rather than receive it. The QR-based network echoes the Freirean idea that knowledge is decentralized, co-created, and grounded in reality, not imposed from above. Using reused paper and a lightweight digital format, the installation proposes a pedagogical gesture: environmental awareness built from humility, dialogue, and attention to what materials reveal.
In this sense, the forest becomes a Freirean classroom—open, horizontal, collaborative, and rooted in the real. It asks each visitor not only to look at the poles as objects, but to enter into conversation with the stories they carry: about extraction, resistance, hope, and the fragile ecologies that sustain us. Through this shared inquiry, the installation honors Freire’s belief that critical consciousness grows wherever people learn to question the world together.”
I discovered the work of Paulo Freire in May 2025, during a facilitation and collective knowledge-sharing intervention carried out within a feminist and pan-African framework. Although his work was not explicitly introduced to me at the time as a theoretical body to be studied, its principles were already at play in the practices being implemented: learning grounded in lived experience, the horizontal circulation of knowledge, the centrality of dialogue, the body, and the sensory, and the collective construction of meaning. This encounter functioned as a retrospective revelation, giving language and political depth to intuitions and gestures that were already present in my practices of architecture, facilitation, and creation. It was from this late yet formative discovery that Freire’s work emerged as an essential interpretive key for this installation.
Ultimately, Arbres à Palabres is a forest assembled from residues — not to imitate nature, but to expose the tension between what we build and what we destroy, between exhaustion and hope. Each pole stands as both wound and possibility, each “leaf” (a reused scrap of architectural paper) as a voice of those who work for the survival of real forests. It is an invitation to follow these paths, to listen to the guardians of trees, and to reconsider the materials that shape our environments and our futures.
for #dendrophiles, Antson’ny tontolo miaina