La Vallée des Ondes

What are all those enormous metallic structures and wires doing in our valley ? When did those white rectangles appear on top of the church ? What is the purpose of those mysterious beige boxes that punctuates all of our roads ?
Network infrastructure of energy and telecommunication, when not completely hidden, remain obscure pieces of equipment. Even though they occupy an increasing space of the countryside landscape, they escape our curiosity, as if antennas were an unquestionably andemic tree spiecie. Few people can draw the relation between the use of their smartphone or the light inside their house and all those antennas and power lines mats, and fewer can talk about political and economical power relations implied by these infrastructures.
La Vallée des Ondes is an investigation lead by 15 primary school kids (7 to 12 years old) in La Meauffe (Normandy 50), to understand what are all those pieces of plastic and metal there for.
This project is not a lesson on the electric grid or telecommunication networks, La Vallé des Ondes challenges those 15 kid’s abbility to empirically build an investigation in order to understand Large Technical Systems.
Alltogether through listeing to radiowaves while walking around the school, asking parents, calling ISP and nuclear plant engineers, building small scale models and drawing hypothesis, the pupils from La Meauffe managed to understand and explain things like “how telephone worked”, “where youtube videos where stored”, “why nuclear plants are needed but dangerous” and other rather complex ‘adult’ questions…
This project takes opposite direction from popularisation and pedagogical simplification as we feel this is the tool by which Industrial hide material reality and sell techno-utopia to the priviledged. We believe that complexity is part of our contemporary world and should not be simplified but presented, as it exist in our physical world, accepting loss in translation. This project is also an exploration on trying to explain only by going on the field and observing the subject (ie High voltage transformation post), trying stuff with what we have around us (starting a fuel generator to explain relation between motors and electricity), and confronting directly with others to build knowledge and critical thoughts.

La Vallée des Ondes is also a broader research on power infrastructures and the land that go beyond the school project, and will be realized as a video documentary.