2026
Terrains Communs, Nevers
Vincent Valéry
& B. Gaulon
with Gordan Savičić
IoLT
Terrains Communs
In telecoms, a neutral host is a shared mast: one structure, owned by no operator in particular, onto which competing providers bolt their antennas. The tower stays neutral. It carries whatever signal is attached to it.
NEUTRAL HOST borrows that model and rebuilds it out of scrap. Our masts are assembled from discarded and reclaimed materials, salvaged street lighting and industrial waste given a second stance. What they carry is artists' work, added over time, which makes each pylon a vertical gallery and a piece of shared infrastructure at once....
The first mast stands at Terrains Communs in Nevers, on a plot of broken concrete that vegetation has already begun to reclaim. It carries our Electro-Agriculture Antenna, grounded in the railway tracks running alongside the site, and an FM transmitter built by Gordan Savičić during NØ SCHOOL NEVERS 26.
Other artists are invited to graft their own work onto the structure. Grafting is the operating principle. A graft either takes hold or is rejected, and the host carries whatever survives.
It is poles, cables, ground rods, rare metals and discarded hardware, and the question of what design owes to that substrate is a material one. NEUTRAL HOST proposes an answer built from the leftovers: infrastructure that hosts culture, generates its own electricity, and will in time run a solar-powered web hosting service.
It belongs to IoLT's ongoing Solar Punk and permacomputing research into hybrid ecologies where technology, waste and living systems share the same support.
A second mast will be installed in Ghent in October 2026 for Design for a Post-Digital Era at Design Museum Gent.
