Nationality Belgian | Name Jean-Francois Paquay | |
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Born 1956 ( 1956 ) Brussels-Uccle Known for Ceramics, urban farming | ||
Jean-Francois Paquay (born 1956 Brussels, Belgium) is a Belgian ceramist, cartographer, inventor, and urban farmer. He crafts his own ceramic glazes from peony, moss and wood ashes that he harvests, burns and prepares himself.
Since the summer of 2012, Paquay has farmed 35-cm square containers, lined with an impermeable agriculture plastic, on the terraces of the Vinci Building at Universite catholique de Louvain.
His urban farming project, Portager (French for kitchen garden (potager) and portable (porter)) is designed to test several of his ideas, namely that handmade soil (a mixture of horse manure, food scraps, raked leaves and chicken-scratched sand) produces high yields, that vegetables can thrive despite shallow soil, that maximised biodiversity enhances plant growth, that each container marks a single pixel of an otherwise monoculture field, and that containers offering different plant varieties can be adjusted to reflect changing environmental conditions as seen on local Belgian TV.