Sambre
2021 – 2030

Olivier Pestiaux is the initiator of the SAMBRE2030 project, which aims to combine artistic and legal reflection within a committed approach. The SAMBRE2030 project is a network of allies and partners working toward one objective: obtaining legal personality for the Sambre River.
www.sambre2030.org/

This work was supported by a FRArt–FNRS research grant.

The Sambre2030 project was initiated following an artistic research conducted in 2021 (exhibited at Galerie Détour in Jambes).

This research was carried out during a journey along the Sambre and Meuse rivers in complete autonomy on a small sailboat specially adapted for the occasion (together with his friend Bernard Thiry). These two rivers give their name to the region of his origins, Entre Sambre et Meuse. Having spent much of his childhood in Africa, the artist wished to reconnect with this territory he knew only slightly, through the question: “How is our identity formed? What does it mean to be ‘born somewhere’ in an age of traceability and geolocation?”

To travel upstream is to travel back through time and into the memory that shapes it—“where one reveals oneself to oneself.” One never sees a landscape or a territory for the first time; one sees it again: it is already there, engraved through stories, collective myths, and diverse images (postcards, paintings…). In this sense, the project was inspired by various pictorial and literary references (Rops, Paulus, Turner, Stevenson, …).

It was upon witnessing the deteriorated state of the Sambre River during this journey—and inspired by a series of international initiatives (the Loire Parliament, actions around the Whanganui River, the Mar Menor in Spain…)—that the Sambre2030 project was launched.