COAL Prize 2022

www.projetcoal.org

Application deadline : 1st March 2022 - Award ceremony 8th June 2022

The LAccolade Foundation is contributing to the 2022 edition of the COAL Prize under the theme of the Oceans.

The ocean is our geographic, dreamlike and political horizon. While the United Nations proclaimed the Decade of Ocean Sciences for Sustainable Development 2021-2030, the COAL Prize 2022 invites artists from around the world to explore these submerged universes to make them accessible to as many people as possible; to reveal what is playing out in the belly of the ocean, from its abyss twenty thousand leagues under the sea to its surface, to give to see and feel what is still unknown; and to imagine new concrete actions to rekindle resilience with the water worlds.

A landscape without a stable character or limit, in perpetual movement, a place where everything changes yet where nothing really changes, both quite concrete and almost abstract, the ocean seems to overflow its geographical definition to designate a sensitive, deeply intimate experience yet widely shared. An experience that conjures up what Romain Rolland called “oceanic feeling”, this emotion which annihilates temporality and space, and which immerses us in a great whole.

This feeling of being just a wave in a limitless ocean is more than ever exacerbated by the ecological context, the issues of which are still often beyond our perception and transcend our human scales of space and time. Among these imperceptible phenomena that are well underway, the transformation of the oceans in the face of climate change and the collapse of biodiversity constitutes a real challenge both for taking action and for raising awareness of sometimes elusive processes. Warming of the oceans, rising water levels, acidification and deoxygenation of the seas, overexploitation of fishery resources, plastic pollution, degradation of marine habitats, proliferation of invasive species… The ocean is succumbing to multiple threats.

The ocean is, however, the basis of the global phenomena that makes our planet habitable. It regulates the water cycle, weather movements, and stabilizes the climate by absorbing more than half of humanity’s CO2 emissions. It constitutes the largest ecosystem on the planet, so vast that it covers three quarters of the Earth’s surface, so deep that it contains 97% of the available water and 99% of the living spaces on earth by volume , home to a unique flora and fauna, in the very place where life first emerged.

Cradle of organic life, it is also that of economic and commercial life, sheltering the majority of humans in its coastal areas and supporting three billion of them, who depend directly on marine biodiversity to meet their needs. The sharing of its resources and its spaces has made the ocean a major diplomatic and geopolitical issue, which connects humans as much as it opposes them: between international cooperation and naval battles, both a reservoir of solutions for the future (energy, materials, etc.) and limitless site of exploitation (extractions, nuclear tests, etc.), the cornerstone of free trade, crisscrossed on all sides and yet still so little known since we have explored less than 5% of its extent.

It is precisely its mystery that fascinates, cultural heritage as much as natural and breeding ground for the imagination, below and beyond the surface and the horizon, where the world begins and where the earth ends, where our mythologies take root, from floating worlds to submerged cities, where the journey begins and where exile ends, in the heart of island worlds and with fantasized sea creatures, where the world of yesterday and that of tomorrow is emerging, whether it was before the flood or after the apocalypse

Moreover, the COAL – Culture & Diversity Student Prize, launched in 2019 by COAL and the Culture & Diversity Foundation is open to the students of French arts and culture schools.

Click here to see the Student Prize open call

THE JURY 2022

Bruno David, President of the National Museum of Natural History

Catherine Dobler, Founder of the LAccolade Foundation

Marc Feldman, General Administrator of the Orchester National de Bretagne

Christine Germain-Donnat, Director of the Museum of Hunting and Nature

Hélène Guenin, Director of MAMAC, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nice

Elsa Guillaume, Artist, lwinner of the 2015 Ocean COAL Prize

Olivier Lerude, Senior Official for Sustainable Development at the Ministry of Culture

Léo Marin, Director of Galerie Eric Mouchet and Curator of The Possible Island

Anne-Marie Melster, Co-founder and Managing Director of ARTPORT_making waves

Charlotte Meunier, President of the Nature Reserves of France

Romain Troublé, Managing Director of the Tara Océan Foundation

THE SELECTION COMMITTEE 2022

Raphaël Abrille, Secretary General of the Museum of Hunting and Nature

Mark Dion, artist

Loic Fel, President of COAL, philosopher and expert in sustainable development

Lauranne Germond, Co-founder of COAL and exhibition curator

Boris Masseron, Surfrider Foundation

Clément Willemin, co-founder of COAL and landscaper

Christopher Yggdre, Curator and artistic director of the LAccolade Foundation

A representative of the Ministry of Culture