Created in 2002 by the artist Robert Milin, Le Jardin aux habitant·es brings together amateur gardeners to maintain a plot of arable land located alongside the Palais de Tokyo. The twenty-year anniversary of this garden offers an opportunity to study this living collaborative and artistic process and to celebrate its evolution through a programme of encounters as well as an edition and an exhibition of new works by the artist on this theme of this garden.

The project Jardin aux habitant·es dates back to 2001, when the artist Robert Milin was invited by Jérôme Sans and Nicolas Bourriaud to create a work on a plot of land on rue de la Manutention to mark the opening of the Palais de Tokyo.

With an artistic practice that centres on interactions between people and the territories that they inhabit, Robert Milin set out to design an interface between a site which, in 2002, was anything but welcoming, and those who tended to it, passed through it or visited it. “I am interested in the non-expert practices developed by people and the way in which they can shape a particular place or can generate forms without necessarily looking to ‘make art’. For me, making work in public space means first and foremost avoiding constructing an object from within the solitude of my studio.” Fifteen inhabitants of Paris and its suburbs volunteered to form a unique community organized around a collective, artistic and plant-based process.

With an artistic practice that centres on interactions between people and the territories that they inhabit, Robert Milin set out to design an interface between a site which, in 2002, was anything but welcoming, and those who tended to it, passed through it or visited it. “I am interested in the non-expert practices developed by people and the way in which they can shape a particular place or can generate forms without necessarily looking to ‘make art’. For me, making work in public space means first and foremost avoiding constructing an object from within the solitude of my studio.” Fifteen inhabitants of Paris and its suburbs volunteered to form a unique community organized around a collective, artistic and plant-based process.

With an artistic practice that centres on interactions between people and the territories that they inhabit, Robert Milin set out to design an interface between a site which, in 2002, was anything but welcoming, and those who tended to it, passed through it or visited it. “I am interested in the non-expert practices developed by people and the way in which they can shape a particular place or can generate forms without necessarily looking to ‘make art’. For me, making work in public space means first and foremost avoiding constructing an object from within the solitude of my studio.” Fifteen inhabitants of Paris and its suburbs volunteered to form a unique community organized around a collective, artistic and plant-based process.

This celebration of the twenty years of the Jardin aux habitant·es offers the chance to look back on Robert Milin and the gardeners’ work, to reflect on the place that has been afforded to the project in the art world and to explore how its quiet independence has allowed it to evolve at times under the radar of contemporary creation. Robert Milin’s new video work assembles archival images and the words of the gardeners. Presented alongside photographic portraits of the fifteen current members of the group, this work retells the story of the discreet and determined evolution of the site and its many inhabitants from the artist’s point of view. The film J’étais jeune, j’avais 14 ans, j’étais berger (2017) weaves together links between the garden, relationships to other environments that have been shaped by distance and exile, and the artistic practice that Robert Milin has been developing for nearly thirty years.