ANIMIST AND INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTIST
Born 8 January 1975 in Angoulême, France, Carine Iriarte holds a BA in Human Sciences (Visual Arts) and a BA in Language Sciences (Digital Communication & New Media). After serving in the French Armed Forces and working as a freelance graphic designer and art-director, she dedicated herself fully to research-creation from 2020.
From 2011 to 2025 she lived and worked in the South of France, near Spain, where Mediterranean landscapes nourished her vital impetus. In 2025 she returned to the Charente region – her maternal ancestral lands by the river in Vitrac-Saint-Vincent – to create a place of experimentation and artistic research on eco-spiritualities. She is currently working on a dissertation « Animism as a futuristic imaginary: reconfigurations of the living in Afro-diasporic and European female videopoetry and ecoperformance practices ». Her collaboration with the poet Tania Haberland « The Torrid Zone » serves as a manifesto of this line of inquiry.
Her main research focus centres on the organic and spiritual bond with water, especially on the concept of “spiritual marriage with water spirit”; on the notion of “family shamanism” as opposed to the patriarchal model of specialised shamanism (as described by anthropologist Roberte Hamayon). Voodoo and serpent-deities are key references in both her research and her own spiritual journey. Travels in Senegal, Djibouti and Algeria have shaped her exploration of African spiritual and sociological dimensions. Her next projects will lead her to the West African coast and Brazil for immersive studies in women’s traditional religions and digital-art experiments in rural spaces.
She collaborates with poets, painters, singers, dancers to experience vibration through slow movement and bodily interactions with the mineral-vegetal-animal world. In May 2021, she launched “Poetics of Reverie”, a collaborative artistic project combining poetic languages, painting, electro music, video, body and nature, with the aspiration to poetically inhabit the flesh of the world and to indulge in daydreaming (called altered state of consciousness by science), which is a resistance and an answer to the grip of a mechanistic and utilitarian world. As Bachelard wrote « we must learn to dream again », diving into ancient cosmogonies that were « audacious reveries » against the tyranny of organized thought. She founded LA SÈRP in October 2025, a translocal ecopoet(h)ic lab bridging art, research and vernacular spiritualities through collaboration between artists and researchers (more details below).
La Sèrp | Ecopoet(h)ic Lab
LA SÈRP promotes research, creation, and transmission rooted in contemporary ecopoetic and animist expressions, embracing an ecofeminist perspective that recognizes and values women’s knowledge, practices, and imaginaries in their relationship to the living world and their creative processes. It draws inspiration from ancestral cosmologies and re-enchantment imaginaries to reactivate the sensitive bonds between humans, non-humans, and natural environments through artistic, intellectual, and spiritual forms.
The association conceives, supports, and disseminates initiatives that interweave art, ecology, and vernacular spirituality—through artistic and research-creation projects in natural and rural environments; mediation and transmission actions dedicated to European vernacular spiritualities; environmental partnerships fostering the protection of ecosystems and poetic sensitivity to the living; and collaborative cultural programs devoted to the emergence of new ecopoetic and animist narratives.
LA SÈRP also hosts residencies, encounters, and creative laboratories open to artists, poets, researchers, and practitioners from diverse living traditions, while fostering intercultural exchanges with territories where Indigenous knowledge systems and traditional spiritualities remain vibrant—particularly within the Global South.
Based in the Charente department (western France), LA SÈRP is a non-profit organization whose name in Occitan (the historical language of the southern half of France) means the serpent (in its feminine form). Official publication : LA SÈRP – Annonce JOAFE n°366 de la parution n°20250043 du 28 octobre 2025 | journal-officiel.gouv.fr
