In this interview, the Cellular biologist François Képès calls for us to move beyond Manichean discourses in the debate around the manipulation of the living by making the question of use our main priority.
explore
Dorcas Mabanza-Kuma is a graduate from the architectural school ENSA Versailles. In her final thesis, which won an award from the Maison de l’Architecture Île-de-France, architecture turns into a place between fiction and documentation to question the ways of dwelling that are customarily described as informal. A matter of perspective…
Beyond the pursuit of progress solely as a belief in an ever-increasing technological control over the world, to compensate for global disruption, new relationships between man and nature and the living continue to develop. The gardener-landscaper Gilles Clément reveals how his activity connects him to all the living beings which interact to maintain the balance of an environment. From this he has developed the concept of the “garden in movement,” a method of gardening that favors the living over form. Rather than a completely hands off approach, it is a collection of interventions to accompany nature rather than oppose it. On an urban scale, his approach as a landscaper valorizes, even stages the “Third (estate) landscape”— abandoned spaces and interstices that form numerous reserves for biodiversity that are essential for human survival—in a symbolic and pedagogical way. Progress could thus be defined not by the illusion of mastery, but by a deeper understanding of the complexity of the living of which we are a part. Conversation between Philippe Chiambaretta and Gilles Clément
Undoing our anthropized visions of the world has become so central to the foremost thinking in the realm of contemporary art that this decentering seems to have become both its role and primary mission. Through her films and installations, the artist Ariane Michel invites us to relocate, to move outside of ourselves so as to modify our perceptions and wander the world as an other. In her pieces she notably uses animals, plants, stones, and the force of the elements, so as to create many new centers of the world and perceptive possibilities. Using tools from the field of cinema and by involving the living, she incarnates in both an artistic and immersive fashion a disanthropization of the world which manipulates the perception of time and shifts points of view by involving the spectator in new relationships. Overwhelming our imagination, she invites us to recreate the world by repositioning us as one element among many others.