Before the Low-tech Lab #

Born in 1989, Clément grew up between the Haute Garonne and the Vendée where he is originally from. During his engineering studies at ICAM, he lived in autarky, as a park ranger, in the heart of the Amazonian forest. He discovered, with the natives, the living on a new scale, between the immense and the infinitesimal as well as a completely different relationship to the environment.
He finished his training in Madrid and in Nantes where he began to work in the aeronautics industry. After three years, he “left the plane” to embark on a sailboat and join Colombia. In South America, it was an opportunity to reconnect with a natural culture and to learn about techniques of empowerment and integration of the habitat.

Low-tech housing #

After a year of excursion, he joined Pierre-Alain Lévèque in Concarneau, on the departure of the Nomade des Mers, to take over the team which left at sea. The Low-tech Lab was born. Quite quickly, after a few stopovers on the laboratory boat, the desire to discover low-tech in the Western context led them to set up a project to document techniques specific to housing: the Low-tech Tour France, with Camille Duband and Amandine Garnier. The enthusiasm linked to this exploratory work leads them to gather the majority of the systems identified in a house-laboratory and to live there, through the four seasons, to evaluate the environmental and economic relevance as well as the quality of life induced by the approach. This “Low-tech Habitat”, a prototype that they live in for over a year, will be the fruit of a series on life on board, a technical report and a book.

Coordinator at Low-tech Lab #

Since 2 years, following the Low-tech Habitat project, Clément has become the Low-tech Lab coordinator. He works with the whole team and the different stakeholders (partners, beneficiaries, people who follow us) to define the vision, the positioning of the Low-tech Lab. Since all the actions carried out by the association (Nomade des Mers, Low-tech Lab Investigations, Low-tech Explorer, etc.) must be coherent, whether it is with the communities, the schools and everyone in the team. That’s the theory …

It’s a bit like being a piano tuner, trying to get everyone to play a nice tune.

Chab (as everyone calls him) has several passions. First of all, art and culture. It is art engineering that attracted him to the low-tech approach. For him, it is necessary to reappropriate the knowledge, the know-how to be able to produce locally, contextually, and to be able to adapt this knowledge in the culture and the art.

Another passion is the living, especially plants. He wonders about our ecosystem, the cohabitation between plants, animals, vertebrates, invertebrates and human beings ; the synergy between all this little world, our coevolution. He has the desire to vegetate and diversify what composes our direct environment, whether for food, to produce our clothes, our houses, our fuels or simply to encourage the living to flourish …

There is almost everything to be done and it is up to each and everyone to do it and to carry it out, to be an entrepreneur and to reinvent a model.

There are new things to invent and I think it’s up to each and everyone to believe in their own thing and to try. You have to try to open your own way !