Published to coincide with Sophie Zénon’s exhibition "L’humus du monde", on display at the Château d’Eau (Toulouse) from 22 November 2025 to 8 March 2026, L’Herbe aux yeux bleus is an artist’s book printed in an edition of 650 copies. L’Herbe aux yeux bleus takes its name from an American plant, the mountain sisyrinchium (Sisyrinchium montanum Greene), which arrived in Lorraine in the fodder of American horses during the First World War. Through this plant, Sophie Zénon explores the way in which nature preserves the memory of conflicts and invites us on a journey through the landscape where vegetation becomes a witness to history.

Conceived as a contemporary herbarium, the book is divided into two volumes: the first, purely visual, presents a series of images without captions, arranged in alphabetical order according to the species featured. Sophie Zénon’s various bodies of work – photograms, imprints, reconstructed landscapes, sculptures and archival fragments – intertwine within it in a free-form arrangement where the transparency of the paper allows memory, traces and ghosts to surface. The second volume, a companion booklet, brings together texts, interviews and an index, offering both scientific and poetic insights into the project.

With a foreword by Damarice Amao, a photography historian and curator at the Centre Pompidou, the book explores the link between memory, territory and the living through the figure of so-called ‘obsidional’ plants.