The voices of the tree: what semiotic construction for a social and environmental symbol of life? Analysis of the recent media and popular narrative emergence of the figure of the tree in France.

Catellani, Andrea [UCL] Céline Pascual Espuny Céline Cholet

The emergence of a "plant" discourse in the French public space is neither a crisis, nor an alert, nor a cleverly orchestrated communication strategy. This emergence in France is a massive, literary, aesthetic and scientific level one. It illustrates, by its importance, a new visibility and audibility in our media spectrum of environmental "speakers". In particular, the place of the tree is emblematic of this emergence, and it renews our view of our close environment. How does this popular, aesthetic, artistic and scientific emergence of the tree fit into the larger inter-discursive framework of the narrative of the plant and, more broadly, of the living? What voices are mixed, how is a complex, cultural, ambivalent, and endearing figure like the tree rediscovered and resemantized? We seek to qualify the different discourses and voices that express themselves on the tree, by analyzing the interdiscursive framework thus constituted and the place of the tree within this new macro-narrative of the living plant. By questioning a corpus made up of a hundred French documents, including literary works, scientific works, illustrated coffee table books, exhibition posters, film posters and pitches of documentaries that deal with the plant world, covering the period from 2014 to 2022, completed with qualitative interviews of authors, directors, scientists, lecturers and photographers who have all worked on certain bestsellers that we consider to be emblematic of the movement. We thus seek to qualify more finely the elaboration and the construction of a renewed glance on the trees.