artists turn ecological grief into memory for 'memo. remembering the futures' exhibition

Fondation d’Entreprise Martell: memo. remembering the futures

At the Fondation d’Entreprise Martell in Cognac, France, an exhibition titled ‘Memo. Remembering the Futures’ opens June 13, 2025, and runs through January 4, 2026. Curated by the Franco-Italian duo d-o-t-s (Laura Drouet and Olivier Lacrouts) and co-produced with the Belgian design center CID at Grand-Hornu, the show brings together 15 transdisciplinary projects that explore how memory – personal, collective, material – can be used as a lens to address ecological loss and envision sustainable futures. The showcase includes works by artists and designers from around the globe, each engaging with sensory experiences, ritual practices, and archival gestures to respond to the escalating environmental crisis.

at the Fondation d’Entreprise Martell, the exhibition titled ‘Memo. Remembering the Futures’ runs through January 4, 2026 | image © Pauline Assathiany

Can a Rug, a Dress, or a Digital Island Keep the Planet Alive?

Established in 2017 in the heart of Cognac, the Fondation d’Entreprise Martell is an incubator for socially and ecologically engaged creativity. With a strong emphasis on regenerative design, the Foundation supports artists, designers, and researchers whose work contributes to environmental and social transition. Through residencies, exhibitions, and public programs, it fosters dialogue between disciplines, territories, and generations. Memo. Remembering the Futures exemplifies the Foundation’s mission: to provide a platform for emerging practices that rethink how we interact with the living world and respond to its ongoing transformation.

Memo. Remembering the Futures is built on the idea that remembering is not just a look backward – but a way of looking forward. In the face of ecological grief, extinction, displacement, and the fading of ancestral knowledge, the featured projects serve as ‘acupuncture points’ in the collective consciousness. Across media, from textiles and sound to performance and digital mapping, the exhibition invites visitors to experience memory as a dynamic, embodied, and often radical act of care.

Roberta di Cosmo, Rebirth – Trauma as a Performative Process, 2020 | image © Ilenia Tesoro

twenty artists Archive a Dying World

Performing Grief in Apulia, Italian designer Roberta Di Cosmo’s Rebirth–Trauma as a Performative Process centers on the devastating spread of the Xylella fastidiosa bacterium, which has decimated olive groves in southern Italy. Centered on the Apulian region’s olive trees, decimated by the Xylella fastidiosa bacterium, the work reflects on collective grief and ancestral knowledge.

The performance, created in collaboration with villagers, preserves harvest gestures and seasonal rituals at risk of disappearing with the groves themselves. The piece anchors itself in Il Gigante, a once-majestic olive tree said to be 2,000 years old, now lifeless. This symbolic skeleton serves as both witness and monument—testifying to a devastated landscape and the people who lived by it. Through embodied storytelling and ritual, Di Cosmo channels the trauma of loss into a process of cultural healing and ecological remembrance.

Emma Bruschi, Almanach Collection – Look 1, rye straw vest and pants | image © Cynthia Mai

Additionally, French designer Emma Bruschi pays homage to agricultural rhythms and ancestral skills with her Almanach collection. Made from rye straw grown on her family’s land in the French Alps, the garments are intricately plaited, woven, and crocheted into accessories and fashion pieces. Bruschi draws on a heritage of peasant crafts, reconnecting fashion with the patience of the growing season.

In a world dominated by industrialized fast fashion, her work insists on slowness, care, and intimacy with material. Every step, from sowing the seeds to stitching the final details, honors the temporal cycles of land and labor. Almanach revives rural memory not as nostalgia but as a radical, rooted alternative for the future of design.

Iamisigo, SS2024 collection Bonde la Vivuli / Valley of Shadows, barkcloth two-tone corset | image © Bugu Ogisi

Back in Africa, in her Bonde la Vivuli/Valley of Shadows collection, Nigerian designer Bubu Ogisi reclaims barkcloth – a sacred Ugandan textile historically used in spiritual and royal contexts. By incorporating this natural fibre into contemporary fashion alongside raffia and bronze, Ogisi weaves ancient knowledge into present-day storytelling. The garments pay tribute to Queen Nyabinghi, an East African ancestral figure whose priestesses wore barkcloth veils during rituals.

For Ogisi, fashion becomes a vessel for memory and resistance. Her work not only preserves endangered material traditions but also revives a matrilineal spiritual lineage that colonialism once sought to erase. Through I A M I S I G O, she creates clothing as living archives—artifacts of both aesthetic beauty and cultural continuity.

Into the Mountain, 2019 | image © Felicity Crawshaw, courtesy Simone Kenyon

Artists Simone Kenyon and Lucy Cash translate landscape into movement in How the Earth Must See Itself (A Thirling), a performance-film inspired by Nan Shepherd’s writings on the Scottish Cairngorms. The work features an all-women ensemble engaging in choreographed gestures across the Glen Feshie valley—reframing walking as a way of listening and belonging. Through touch, repetition, and presence, the performers make memory physical.

Set against a stark mountainous backdrop, the film meditates on how bodies can archive place. Just as the land carries imprints of water, weather, and time, so too do the dancers’ movements become inscriptions of awareness. Their choreography reminds us that to remember the earth is to feel it—viscerally, intimately, and again and again.

And behold the avocado capitalism with Conflict Avocados by Mexican designer Fernando Laposse, who exposes the environmental and social costs of avocado monoculture in Michoacán. Once a local crop, the avocado has become ‘green gold’ – fueling deforestation, corruption, and cartel violence. Laposse documents this extractive economy through a blend of handcrafted furniture, textiles, and photojournalism.

The installation acts as both archive and protest, giving voice to displaced communities and threatened ecosystems, including the monarch butterfly’s habitat. By embedding his research into design objects, Laposse confronts the environmental and social consequences of Western consumer trends. Conflict Avocados urges viewers to reconsider what sustainability really means in a global supply chain.

All while Dutch designer Liselot Cobelens transforms the impact of a devastating 2020 wildfire in the Deurnese Peel into a tangible, tactile memorial. The piece—a large, map-like wool rug—was physically burned by the artist using a welding torch, embedding the landscape’s trauma into the material itself. The eight tonal variations in the rug reflect the degrees of drought across the scorched national park, turning the object into a cartography of climate-induced transformation.

Drawing from archival research and fieldwork, Cobelens collaborated with local farmers and environmental experts to better understand the land’s ecological grief. By converting this research into design, Dryland becomes both an artistic response and a call for reflection on the human and environmental consequences of a warming world. It’s a woven warning that what burns today may not grow back tomorrow.

The First Digital Nation by Collider and The Monkeys, 2022 | image © Collider

Leading the visitor is powerful political gesture, Tuvalu, The First Digital Nation by Collider and The Monkeys that captures a real-time existential crisis: the total submersion of an island nation. Using 3D mapping, drone footage, and immersive digital media, the project virtually preserves Tuvalu’s geography, language, oral traditions, and natural landscapes. This digital reconstruction is a poignant act of cultural preservation as rising seas render the physical territory increasingly uninhabitable.

At once a technological solution and philosophical provocation, the project challenges global ideas of sovereignty and nationhood. Can a country survive in the cloud? Will international law recognize a digital state? Tuvalu forces viewers to confront the paradox of using cutting-edge technology to memorialize what we are failing to protect in the real world.

running through January 4, 2026, the showcase includes works by artists and designers from around the globe | image © Pauline Assathiany

each artist engages with sensory experiences, ritual practices, and archival gestures to respond to the escalating environmental crisis | image © Pauline Assathiany

Memo. Remembering the Futures is built on the idea that remembering is not just a look backward – but a way of looking forward | image © Pauline Assathiany

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across media, from textiles and sound to performance and digital mapping, the exhibition invites visitors to experience memory as a dynamic, embodied, and often radical act of care | image © Pauline Assathiany

the challenges the artists address (such as river man- agement, monocultures, species extinction, and the preserva- tion of ancestral knowledge) resonate particularly in Charente and more broadly in France | image © Pauline Assathiany

promoting committed transdisciplinary approaches, these projects aim to nourish the visitors’ ecological consciousness, whatever their age, to induce reflection, create emotion, motivate engagement, and prompt action in our daily environments | image © Pauline Assathiany

the interventions by the fifteen artists are militant, critical, and timely | image © Pauline Assathiany

project info:

exhibition name: Memo. Remembering the Futures

organization: Fondation d’Entreprise Martell | @fondationmartell

concept & curatorship: d-o-t-s (Laura Drouet & Olivier Lacrouts) | @we_are_dots
scenography: Olivier Vadrot
graphic design: WIP office | @wip.eu
co-production: CID Grand-Hornu | @cidgrandhornu

artists: Félix Blume (France), Emma Bruschi (France), Liselot Cobelens (Netherlands), Collider x The Monkeys (Australia),  dach&zephir (France), Roberta Di Cosmo (Italy), Cian Dayrit & Cla Ruzol (The Philippines),  Alexis Foiny (France), Suzanne Husky (France / USA), Simone Kenyon & Lucy Cash (United Kingdom), Fernando Laposse (Mexico), Sally Ann McIntyre (New-Zealand), Neve Insular (Cabo Verde) , Bubu Ogisi / I A M I S I G O (Nigeria), Yesenia Thibault-Picazo (France)

dates: June 13, 2025 – January 4, 2026