Followly is an art–science initiative founded by filmmakers and nature educators Valentine Bourrat and Nicolas Van Achter, exploring animal tracking as a practice of attention, producing knowledge and transmitting cultures of the field.
founders & art directors:
Valentine Bourrat
environmental educator and cultural producer
Before developing her work in nature education, Valentine worked as a journalist and war correspondent, covering international events and reporting from several regions of the world. She later moved into cultural production, notably contributing to the renowned programme Tracks on Arte, a transnational European broadcaster known for its editorial independence and its exploration of emerging artistic and cultural scenes.
Today, Valentine works primarily as a nature educator in Paris. Through the initiative Les Ateliers Sauvages, she accompanies groups of young participants beyond the city, developing sensory field workshops that reconnect children and teenagers with their perceptual capacities and with environments often distant from urban life.
She is also the author of Slow Kids, a book that inspires families to reconnect with the living world rather than with screens.
Nicolas Van Achter
documentary and dance filmmaker
Nicolas Van Achter is a Belgian filmmaker interested in the ambivalences of contemporary life. With over 20 years of experience in creative documentary filmmaking and institutional and NGO communication, he has developed a practice that moves between different scales of observation from institutional structures to the everyday practices of communities, bodies and landscapes.
Trained in anthropology, his work combines co-creation, experimentation, intellectual rigor and embodied field practices. It aims at creating situations in which different forms of knowledges, perceptions, perspectives and affects can meet.
Years spent filming dancers radically shaped his understanding of the medium: learning to follow rather than direct, to read movement before meaning, and to work with rhythm, space, attention and the intelligence of the body. This experience progressively led him towards more embodied and non-verbal ways of encountering the world.
His work today moves between artistic experimentation, philosophical inquiry and field practice, exploring questions of sacredness, interconnection and our relationships with the living world. His involvement in transdisciplinary collectives including Blackmilk, Neo Ten, Continuum and Ars Memoria, as well as his more recent project Unmade Frames, has further developed his interest in non-linear storytelling, participatory cinema and forms influenced by deep and dark ecology.
scientific advisors:
Maybe You
as our scientific advisor
Followly can also be understood as a visual laboratory where ideas related to tracking, perception and situated knowledge are explored through image, sound and editing rather than primarily through writing.
Over the past decades, an important body of scientific and academic literature has succeeded in articulating forms of writing that approach the sensitivity of poetry while remaining methodologically rigorous.
We read this literature with great passion and admiration; it has profoundly shaped the way we think about attention, perception and our relationship to the world. At the same time, we feel a certain responsibility to contribute, within our own field of practice, to this broader intellectual movement. Followly therefore seeks to explore how audiovisual language might offer another mode of inquiry and transmission, capable of making certain ideas felt as much as understood., while remaining attentive to intellectual rigor and to the complexities these subjects require.
We do not claim to be pioneering experimental filmmakers or radical visual artists who will reinvent the language of cinema. Rather, we approach this work with humility, seeking to learn from existing artistic practices and to build respectful bridges with the world of art. Our intention is to further hybridise documentary observation, field experience and visual experimentation in ways that remain accessible to diverse audiences.
With the constellation of collaborators surrounding the project (practitioners, educators, researchers and artists) we hope to develop formats that are both intellectually meaningful and publicly approachable. Such formats may allow these perspectives to circulate within institutional contexts, including European programmes and public initiatives concerned with environmental issues. Our ambition is not to oppose mainstream ecological narratives, but to gently broaden the conversation by bringing into view forms of knowledge, attention and practice that are sometimes overlooked in dominant environmental discourses.
Peut-être Vous
notre conseiller.e scientifique
Nous aimerions prolonger avec les moyens du son, de l’image et du montage les intuitions qui circulent depuis plusieurs décennies dans une certaine littérature scientifique et philosophique que nous lisons avec une immense admiration. Cette littérature a réussi quelque chose d’assez rare : articuler une écriture d’une grande précision conceptuelle, souvent proche de la poésie, tout en affrontant de manière exigeante la question délicate de l’anthropomorphisme et des relations entre humains, non-humains et milieux. Et à rester crédible académiquement tout en ouvrant des passages vers un public plus large.
Ces textes constituent pour nous une véritable forge : ils ont profondément transformé notre manière d’être attentifs au monde, aux signes, aux relations qui se tissent entre les êtres et les paysages. Mais précisément pour cette raison, nous ressentons aussi une forme de responsabilité : essayer d’apporter à notre tour quelque chose à ce mouvement intellectuel.
Nous n’avons évidemment pas la prétention d’être les grands intellectuels, plasticiens ou cinéastes qui viendraient révolutionner ces langages. Notre désir serait plutôt de tendre la main aux mondes de l’art et de la recherche, d’hybrider encore un peu plus nos pratiques documentaires avec certaines formes de recherche artistique, afin d’inventer des dispositifs sensibles capables de faire circuler ces idées autrement.
Avec la constellation de praticiens, d’éducateurs, de pisteurs, de chercheurs et d’artistes que nous espérons rassembler autour de Followly, nous aimerions développer des formes qui restent accessibles, capables de toucher la part sensible de l’expérience humaine. Des formes qui pourraient éveiller une curiosité, faire vibrer quelque chose chez celles et ceux qui les rencontrent, et peut-être ouvrir, de quelques centimètres supplémentaires notre compréhension des questions écologiques.
L’une de nos ambitions est aussi que ces formes puissent trouver leur chemin dans différents contextes culturels ou même institutionnels, idéalement au niveau européen afin de multiplier les occasions de rencontre avec ces manières de penser l’écologie.