In October 2015, Ackroyd & Harvey and the N.A! Fund will begin a two-month tour of half a dozen French cities. The objective is to inspire debate and mobilise, meet and move the broadest possible audience around climate change and the issues to be addressed when the COP21 meets in Paris from 30 November to 11 December 2015.

Beuys on Tour is the continuation of the work the pair began at dOCUMENTA in Kassel, Germany in 2007, when Ackroyd & Harvey collected several hundred acorns fallen from the 7000 oaks that German artist Joseph Beuys planted in 1982. Ever since, Ackroyd & Harvey have been pursuing Beuys’s dream for cities to become like forests. The British artists sprout the acorns, tend to the saplings and exhibit them, as they did at La Maréchalerie in Versailles last July.

This autumn Ackroyd & Harvey will take the descendants of Beuys’s oaks to Nantes, Bordeaux, Nice and Mulhouse, bringing scientists, academics and artists in contact with audiences to dialogue about climate change. At the end of the tour, on 29 November 2015, a few days before the COP21 talks begin, an oak tree will be planted in Paris with representatives of the cities present.