Vivre en Flamant Rose
Living as Flamingo
Vivre en [Flamant] Rose | Living as Flamingo is a fable in DESIGN EARTH’s Elephant in the Room series. Taking the Greater Flamingo as an unruly emblem of the Camargue, the project follows the Rhône delta across nest earthworks, salt pans, rice fields, conservation infrastructures, tourist imaginaries, and Mediterranean flyways. The project unfolds as a long drawing scroll, a six-minute bilingual animation, and a graphic novel with rhyming text, accompanied by a media archive of approximately 150 images. Together, these materials situate the fable within histories of technology and the environment, colonialism, labor, leisure, philanthropy, ecological grief, and survival.
- Project Lead
Rania Ghosn, MIT
- Research Team
El Hadi Jazairy
Monica Britt Hutton
Ivan Shen, MIT
Juliet Chui, MIT
Jabari Canada, MIT
Narrated by Vinciane Despret (French) and Paola Antonelli (English)- Research Areas
Environmental Storytelling
Speculative Fiction
Climate Change
Vivre en [Flamant] Rose | Living as Flamingo reimagines the Greater Flamingo as an unruly guide to the Camargue: a bird at once iconic, monitored, commodified, and migratory. The project situates the Rhône delta within overlapping histories of water management, salt extraction, rice cultivation, conservation science, tourism, and climate change. It follows the flamingo across nest earthworks, artificial islands, banding stations, salt bags, golf courses, cultural institutions, and Mediterranean flyways, asking how a celebrated regional emblem might also reveal the fragility of wetland worlds under sea-level rise, drought, salinity, pollution, and habitat loss.
Through its fable mode, the project translates environmental research into a public, affective, and political narrative. The work takes form as a long drawing scroll, a six-minute bilingual animation, and a graphic novel with rhyming text, accompanied by a media archive of approximately 150 images. Structured in five acts—Nest, Band, Migrate, Recreate, and Museum—the fable combines archival research, field observation, and secondary references, into visual storytelling and speculative fabulation. In conversation with Vinciane Despret’s attention to animal agency, the final act asks what flamingos might say—or refuse to say—if addressed “the proper way.”
Rather than treating the flamingo as mascot, Living as Flamingo presents it as a participant in a multi-species conference: a maker of mud worlds, a reader of shallow waters, and a figure of refusal. The project’s title détourns la vie en rose: “pink action” becomes both climate imagination and collective call—a flamboyance, a pink tide, no levee can repeal.
Living as Flamingo, narrated by Paola Antonelli [English]
Vivre en (Flamant) Rose, narrated by Vinciane Despret (French)