ANIMIST AND INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTIST
Born January 1975 in Angoulême (France), Carine Iriarte holds an MA in Cultural Studies (mention: Cultures in Motion). After serving in the French Armed Forces and working as a freelance graphic designer, she has devoted herself fully to independent research-creation since 2020. Her current work combines artistic practice with research and writing on performative ecologies and animist imaginaries.
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 artistic research on eco-spiritualities. She is currently working on a dissertation exploring ecoperformance and animist imaginaries in the practices of women artists, with a particular focus on African sensibilities. Her collaboration with the poet Tania Haberland « The Torrid Zone » serves as a manifesto of this line of inquiry.
Her research also explores organic and spiritual relationships with water, especially through the theme of spiritual marriage with water spirits. Field experiences in Senegal, Djibouti, and Algeria have deepened her interest in African spiritual and social imaginaries. Her upcoming projects will take her to the West African coast and Brazil for immersive research into women’s traditional religions and serpent-related cults.
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-acoustic sounds, 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.
Carine has founded LA SÈRP in October 2025, a translocal ecopoet(h)ic lab bridging art, ecology and vernacular spiritualities, based in rural France (more details below↓).
La Sèrp | Ecopoet(h)ic Lab
LA SÈRP is a non-profit organization for research and creation exploring contemporary ecopoetic and animist imaginaries through an ecofeminist lens. Rooted in ancestral cosmologies and processes of re-enchantment, it investigates sensitive relations between humans, non-humans, and living environments, where artistic practice becomes a mode of listening, transmission, and transformation. In resonance with Suzi Gablik’s call for a re-enchanted art — one capable of breaking away from compulsive consumerist frameworks and reopening access to the primordial and to ritual — LA SÈRP conceives art as a space for a possible mystical renewal.
LA SÈRP develops research-creation projects at the crossroads of art, ecology, and vernacular spirituality, with particular attention to European popular traditions, rural landscapes, and situated ecological practices, while cultivating strong links with territories of the Global South where Indigenous knowledge systems and animist cosmologies remain active and embodied. Its work fosters poetic forms of ecological awareness and opens spaces for renewed narratives of the living, grounded in cross-cultural resonances and exchanges.
The name LA SÈRP comes from Occitan — the historical language of southern France — and designates 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
