91530 Le Marais: one hemp farm near Paris is using culture to save the soil
Fifty kilometres from Paris, 91530 LE MARAIS is turning hemp fields into exhibition spaces — and asking whether art might be the most powerful tool we have for saving the soil
91530 LE MARAIS – Less than an hour’s drive from the centre of Paris. The first thing you notice is the silence. Then the smell of earth. Somewhere between a ceramic kiln and a quarry of ancient local clay, the unmistakable sense that something quietly radical is happening here.
Less than an hour’s drive from the centre of Paris, this working hemp farm has become one of France’s most intriguing experiments at the intersection of agriculture, art, and environmental science. It is simultaneously a research centre, an artists’ residency, and a commercial enterprise — and its co-founders, Victoire De Pourtales and Benjamin Eymere, are convinced that none of it would work if you separated the parts.
“We envision soil health as an overall goal for our company. We believe that to make healthy soil a cause of action for everyone, we need a cultural encounter. Otherwise it will always be an abstract idea,” says Eymere, who brings a background in corporate law and M&A rather than agronomy to his role as the project’s storyteller-in-chief.
It is a provocative thesis — that the path to regenerative farming runs through the gallery as much as the laboratory. Six years in, the evidence is mounting.
Why Hemp Is the Key Transition Crop for Regenerative Farming and Soil Health
The farm’s agricultural logic is grounded in hard science. When De Pourtales and Eymere first consulted agronomists about transitioning the land from conventional to regenerative practices, the recommendation was unambiguous: start with hemp. As a rotation crop, it rehabilitates depleted soil, requires minimal chemical input, and sequesters carbon at a rate that makes it one of the more compelling natural tools in the fight against climate change.
At 91530 LE MARAIS, hemp is also a raw material — spun into fibre for the fashion industry, compressed into a concrete-like building material prized by architects and interior designers, and cold-pressed into oil. The farm operates as a dual entity: part agricultural business, part creative industry supplier.
“Creative industries have an impact on soil health. We are a hemp farm, but our textile production is transformed by fashion and art. We also transform hemp into a material with added value for architects. These examples show how far we can go using something that is good for the soil,” De Pourtales explains.
How an Artists’ Residency Near Paris Is Bridging Contemporary Art, Hemp, and Regenerative Agriculture
The residency programme — which has attracted artists, scientists, designers, and geologists over the past six years — is what sets 91530 LE MARAIS apart from other regenerative farming initiatives. De Pourtales, who previously directed the David Zwirner Paris gallery and co-founded VNH Gallery, brings a curator’s eye to what is, at its core, a farming operation. The result is something that resists easy categorisation.
“The artists come on site, look at our farming practices, spend time here, and sometimes want to bring scientists in. 91530 LE MARAIS sits on a particular land — there is a lot of water, which is why it’s called Le Marais. We have a ceramic facility, and a quarry where they used to make bricks from local clay. We worked with a geologist to understand what was in the ground. We want the artists to be inspired by the materials we have on-site,” says De Pourtales.
The most recent programme, titled Artena, produced a series of works that tested what it means to make art from and about living systems. Among them, French textile artist Desire Moheb-Zandi created Earth Remembers (2025), using hemp from the farm alongside hand-spun wool, natural plant-dyed fibres, and recycled yarns to trace what she describes as the vertical stratigraphy of knowledge — the gestures, stories, and skills passed between generations. The work was exhibited at Asia Now Art Fair at Monnaie de Paris as part of a diptych with Marion Flament’s Matter of Exchange (2025).
Adélaïde Cioni and Hemp as a Universal Language: Three Years of Artistic Research at 91530 LE MARAIS
Perhaps the farm’s most sustained artistic collaboration has been with Italian multimedia artist Adélaïde Cioni, who has worked with the team for three years exploring the potential of the farm’s hemp. Cioni — described by De Pourtales as “one of the Italian artists right now” — came to visual art via a career as a translator of American literature, frustrated by the words that resisted translation. She turned instead to universal signs: form, repetition, material.
Her installation Teatro Mobile (2025) channels the energy of growth through elementary geometric forms — shapes that echo sprouts emerging from soil. Her textile series Hemp Songs, permanently installed at the Auberge at 91530 LE MARAIS, investigates repetition as a form of communication, using painting and embroidery to generate rhythm and motion.
“She speaks about hemp as a second skin because she works with it so deeply. The series is quite abstract and figurative at the same time. She wants it to speak to everyone — and it does,” says De Pourtales.
Why Cultural Engagement Is Essential to the Future of Sustainable Farming and Carbon Sequestration
What 91530 LE MARAIS is ultimately testing is a hypothesis about how change happens. Not through policy alone, or through science alone, but through the kind of cultural encounter that makes an idea feel urgent and personal. If soil health remains a technical abstraction, it will remain the concern of agronomists. If it becomes the subject of art — something you can see, touch, wear, or walk through — it might become everyone’s concern.
The farm is still a working experiment. With growing interest from the fashion, architecture, and contemporary art worlds, De Pourtales and Eymere are finding that the most effective way to make people care about what is beneath their feet may be to show them something beautiful made from it.
