Les Vaîtes is an area on the edge of the countryside and the city of Besançon, where some historic worker orchards are located. Since 2005, the city council has been promoting an urban development project aimed at creating an “eco-district”, which at the time led to the expropriation of a large number of agricultural plots which were then reclassified as land for development. The project thus involved the almost total destruction of orchards and natural spaces maintained until now by a self-organized community.

For a month, Anaïs Florin walked, talked, collected stories, anecdotes and feelings from the people who cultivate the land of the Vaîtes gardens. “Nos jardins” (“Our gardens”) were made concrete through two different interventions.

This first intervention was carried out in the city center and on the tramway line that connects the city center and the Vaîtes district. It consisted in the realization of 24 posters placed, thanks to pirate keys, in the public panels, made from photographs taken during walks in the gardens of Vaîtes. On these photos, the sentence “Les Vaîtes avant l’écoquartier” (“The Vaîtes before the eco-district”) was added to make it easier for passers-by to identify the area and to denounce its future and hypothetical disappearance.