Anne Chaniolleau, a dramaturge, lives in Gironde on the banks of the Dordogne River. For the past twenty years, she has developed part of her theoretical practice there, using the river as a metaphor within the field of design to question the material limits of our desires and their tendency to submit to proprietary ambitions.

Dove Perspicacius, a visual artist and ceramicist, lives in the Cévennes on the banks of the Luech River. She has developed a practice of creating ex-votos made to commission from the deeply personal stories shared with her. In recent years, she has expanded her ceramic practice by using materials and tools gathered during her travels.Dove Perspicacius and Anne Chaniolleau came together around a ceramic project centred on river mud.Research Project at Fondation Martell

During their residency at the Foundation, the two artists continued their collection of river mud. After working with sediments from the Dordogne, they extended their research to the Charente River.Found along riverbanks, slipways, and millraces, mud occupies an uncertain and often overlooked zone that blurs the boundaries between land and water. Rather than seeing it as an inconvenient deposit, the duo approaches it as a hybrid material capable of generating new narratives of transformation and metamorphosis.In the ceramics studio, they apply these sediments to locally sourced clays. When fired at high temperatures, the mud melts and vitrifies, revealing a broad palette of glazes whose colours and textures seem to reproduce the dark meanders from which the material was extracted.Residency Outcomes

Throughout the residency, the artists sought to understand and become familiar with this living material through a rigorous experimental protocol.Their fieldwork, research in heritage libraries, and exchanges with river-related institutions introduced them to the creatures, stories, and legends that inhabit this opaque environment.Drawing upon this repertoire of forms and narratives, they began developing a collection of artefacts intended for amphibious inhabitants—whether living, vanished, or imaginary.Connection to the Almanach Lab

The work of Dove Perspicacius and Anne Chaniolleau is one of precision, in which technical and poetic processes must be understood as inseparable. It proposes a particular way of tracing material through an investigation of the soils and flows that shape a territory, while accompanying the profound transformations produced by its mysterious chemical processes.This experimental approach, characteristic of radical design, combines methodological rigour with the creation of narratives, producing a new way of engaging with and understanding material resources.Resources Mobilised

• Mud deposits from the Charente and Dordogne rivers
• Woodland soils from across the region’s forest undergrowth areas