Engaging Caring Practices through Water Narratives in Le Vallon, Lausanne

This work is a continuation of the Enoncé Théorique, Matters of Care: About the Entanglements of Waters and More-Than-Human Worlds, which explores how caring about water can help us understand the intertwining of our environments and identify the places in need of care. The research and project focus on the Vallon of Sauvabelin in Lausanne as a site of observation, experimentation and projection. Although water is not always visible at first sight, the evolution of the valley and its current challenges are deeply linked to modern society’s conceptual abstraction and physical distancing of water, regardless of its ecological and social relations. From the territorial scale, with its climatic, hydraulic, ecological and soil contamination issues, to the local scale, which also faces social, economic and gentrification challenges, the Vallon concentrates both multiscalar pressures and numerous agents of care, such as its local associations and more-than-human communities and networks. Caring for all types of water and rethinking their paths, cycles and interactions enables us to project the transition of the site, where soils are gradually desealed and depolluted, and metropolitan industrial functions give way to repurposed programs made available to local communities. The various interventions aim to articulate the relationship between the built and unbuilt environment, in order to activate participatory and collective practices of repair, care and engagement, through the porosity, proximity and tactility of water-related processes.