Toward a wild Renaissance

First of all, could you tell us how you arrived at the reflections that you develop in your book, Renaissance sauvage?

My research began during visits to the Musée du Quai-Branly, and then to the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie, where I worked. It was very intuitive to begin with. The Quai-Branly, thanks to its near-universal geographical scope, complements Western concepts with those drawn from a wide variety of other cultures. This raises a number of questions, from the very existence of the concept of art, to its meaning and functions, by way of the relationships that it produces between mankind and the world. The Musée d’Orsay is like a microscope. In the artworks, we can try to observe the implicit acceleration of the first industrial revolution and the emergence of environmental thinking. Scientific studies on these subjects appeared at the same time as an awareness began to emerge amongst different artists. Very quickly, I began to draw a parallel between the current situation and these avant-gardes, and particularly the movements of total works of art (Arts and Crafts and its repercussions, the Secessions, the studios and schools that popped up all over Europe, in Japan or in the United States, driven by the ideal of a new potential alliance between art and society).

This was accompanied by an introduction to the geopoetics of Kenneth White, who played a significant role in the development of my intellectual approach. I was introduced to a method of thinking located at the intersection of disciplines, to an “intellectual nomadism”, whose freedom and demands continue to guide me.

I was also greatly influenced by the physicist Basarab Nicolscu. He collaborated with Stéphane Lupasco, a Romanian philosopher who arrived in France in the 1920s, and whose writings about art were the visual demonstrations of his theories. Basarab Nicolescu addressed certain shortcomings and continued his work. His career as a specialist in particle physics was complemented by his philosophical contributions, his reflections on poetry, and his role in clarifying the concept of transdisciplinarity.

Transdisciplinarity is vital for ecological thinking, which is essentially a way of thinking about relationships, complexity, multitudes and the One. It is unfortunately subject to much confusion. Four approaches must be understood as being both distinct and complementary. We use the term disciplinarity when a discipline, by means of its methodology, focuses on an object (or subject). Pluridisciplinarity is when several disciplines, each with their own methodology, approach the same object. Interdisciplinarity is when one discipline borrows the methodology of another discipline (for example, when medicine borrows from physics). Transdisciplinarity refers to the study of what lies between, across, and beyond the levels of reality. A “level of reality” is a level governed by completely different laws to other levels. For example, classical physics and quantum physics represent two different levels of reality. Reality (that which is) is made up of a great number of levels. Transdisciplinarity attempts to understand what links them, what enables them to work together, and how diversity is included in the Whole.

In other words, focusing on a complete and complex object of study, or more generally, on the completeness of reality (we might also say, accessing Knowledge) also requires us to focus on what is between, across, and beyond the levels of reality. We encounter areas which Basarab Nicolescucalled “zones of non-resistance” (where our theories, tools and perceptions are powerless), which I refer to in Renaissance sauvage as “the mystery”. These areas call for other resources and other approaches. This is why we find people in the field of transdisciplinarity who are interested in poetry and art. Scientific research is constantly progressing, but it will always come up against a degree of mystery which we must accept and incorporate (incidentally acknowledging our finiteness and our insurmountable inability to possess all of the keys of reality).

That is where poetry comes in, or rather, poetics: not as a space or means to reveal what will forever remain a mystery, but as a possibility of becoming aware of the existence of mystery and integrating it into our models. Hence Basarab Nicolscu’s “poetic theorem”: knowledge = science + poetry, or science + mystery, one might also say, which implies that the completeness of knowledge cannot do without poetry, which must be considered as a contact membrane with something that isforever escaping us. In this sense, the poetic dimension of art must be invoked in an art-science project in order for it to be truly and efficiently transdisciplinary (failing this, we see art playing a more or less successful illustrative role, or playing according to a score that is completely disconnected from the rest of the approach).

In your view, how has this environmental awareness, which began in the 19th century, now led to a new “renaissance”?

The idea of a new renaissance was based on a reading of the 15th and 16th centuries, from which I extracted the concept of a transhistorical, philosophical and ecological renaissance. Simply put, a renaissance represents a shift in the way in which mankind thinks of itself and acts in the world. Hence a change of perspective, inasmuch as a perspective is the expression of a certain position in the world. The Renaissance in Italy, heir to the late Middle Ages and to a reappropriation of antiquity, bore witness to a philosophical shift that placed mankind at the centre, and manifested itself through the invention of the monofocal perspective. Today, I observe a shift on the same scale, obviously informed by another intellectual breeding ground and transposed by another kind of perspective (a characteristic of a transhistorical concept is that it is specified in each era in which it re-emerges).

This renaissance (time will tell whether it will establish itself or not) is present in all branches of society, and most especially in the fields of art and architecture. In my book, I study a significant corpus of productions that sheds light on its particular perspective, which I call a “symbiotic perspective”. We can define it as the identification of and the collaboration between different eventhoods, with the aim of creating based on an ideal of concordance. The all-powerful artist no longer creates a painting from his point of view and according to the proportions of humanity. Instead, the work of art is a mutual enterprise in collaboration with forces that are invoked for their creative potential.

“Wild” seemed to me to be the most interesting term to describe the turning point that we are facing. As the Renaissance appropriated and sometimes reinterpreted antiquity, we now find ourselves in an era of re-investigation of the meaning of mankind and nature, and of mankind’s role in nature.

In the 1970s, the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard claimed that our societies had entered into a “postmodernity”, characterised by the decline of the great narratives. The great philosophies, ideologies and religions, which had been capable of ordering history and human action and making them intelligible, were no longer able to impose themselves. An era of relativism took hold, in which differences of opinions crystallised with no possibility of resolution. I believe that the void left by the great narratives of the past is about to be filled by what I call a great referent, capable of supporting a societal project and of making mankind’s actions on Earth intelligible. With the term “wild”, I am condensing the revision of our relationship to nature. By referent, I mean something more open than a narrative, something shared, that federates a superior sense of belonging which we recognise ourselves in and refer to, despite our differences of opinion.

“Wild” is a term that is heavy with history and full of contradictory connotations, when it is not simply, these days, a fashionable slogan of uncertain meaning. I think that it is important to examine the complexity of its history in order to separate ourselves from it. It is not a question of reconnecting with a hypothetical “golden age”, or of condemning any kind of backward or barbaric primitivism. The wild that interests me calls for a new definition. Associated with the term “renaissance”, it affirms itself as an ontology and an ethics of action.

During a conversation with Basarab Nicolescu, I asked him how we could consider the most irreducible part of reality. Inspired by his approach and that of Stéphane Lupasco, I asked him whether this was not a dynamic principle. The term “anima” then came to mind, as much for its fortune in antiquity, which it would be fascinating to revisit, as for its etymology and its presence in concepts central to my work. Anima (the soul, as breath, which I also choose to understand from a Far Eastern perspective), becomes animation, animal and animality. It is therefore possible to conceive of an animality that stems from the dynamic principle that brings reality to life, an animality which is itself movement and spirit, with which I characterise mankind. To attempt a definition, I refer to a three-part animality: cosmological, spiritual, and biological.

Biological animality refers to a man who does not consider himself to be separate from other animals, but as an animal himself, who fulfils himself not by trying to dominate or master this condition, but by accepting it, and seeking to live in harmony with other species. Cosmological animality is the awareness of belonging to a Whole (cosmos) which is not a system, but a life logic that is greater than man and that integrates mystery. Spiritual animality refers to the idea of being part of an intercorrelated, interconnected world. It calls for the development of a new spirituality of relationships (we can see the florescence of this idea in contemporary environmental thinking).

Before this turning point, you identified a long period of “pre-renaissance”. What did this consist of?

What I call pre-renaissance, in the same way as there was a preparatory period for the Renaissance in the 15th and 16th centuries, consists of a period of some one hundred and fifty years, which saw the emergence and development of thinking about environmental science, alongside an art that presented itself as a possible answer to the calling into question of the habitability of the world operated by great threats such as the acceleration of the first industrial revolution, the world wars, and the popularisation and multiplication of environmental crises from the 1960s. The pre-renaissance paved the way for the shift that we are now experiencing, by consolidating philosophical resources, economic research, scientific research, and, on the artistic level, by expanding the concept of art, and making it accessible once more, enriched by a societal function which had been long-lost in the West.

Concerns about the impact of human actions on nature are not new (they can be found, for example, in the work of Leonardo da Vinci), but a school of thought and concerted scientific research emerged from the mid-19th century, during a period of increase in the use of fossil fuels and in the scale of the damage. Several artistic avant-gardes drew their inspiration from the observation of a societal model that diminished the individual, destroyed the meaning and value of work, deteriorated living conditions, polluted, and imposed ugliness everywhere. For theorists and artists such as John Ruskin and William Morris, art had the vocation and the potential to address everything. It was to be the touchstone for the development of a new method of production and life. Inasmuch as the environment shapes the people who live in it, they believed that attention must be paid to the structure of the cities (for example, the proposal of the “garden-cities”) as well as to our daily constructed lives, which art approaches in all their forms, from the house to the little spoon, by way of the decorative elements. Nothing is inert, everything acts: aesthetics is a powerful motor which must be activated in order to build a new society.

It is from this perspective that we must interpret Art nouveau, the Deutscher Werkbund, Bauhaus… All of these initiatives were based on the idea of total art. Dada is another expression of this, with slightly different roots, especially due to the influence of anarchist thinking (which, we must recall, attributes great importance to nature). This idea persisted in movements in the 1960s such as Fluxus, Neo Dada Organizers and someone like Joseph Beuys, who united art, ecology, politics, and the thinking of Rudolf Steiner, the father of anthroposophy (and biodynamic agriculture). In the 1960s, some of the Arte Povera artists paved the way for an art that was resolutely committed to environmental questions, which also emerged in other countries, particularly in the United States with artists such as Alan Sonfist, Agnes Dénes, Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, but also with certain Land Artists. The Wild pre-renaissance ended with two currents which took on another dimension: that of the “relationship” associated with a critique of existing socio-economic structures, which Nicolas Bourriaud theorised under the name of “relational aesthetics”, and that of bio-art, which accompanied the biological shift which we are currently experiencing.

The Wild renaissance is therefore rooted in this legacy of different influences. It is the product of a development and convergence of philosophy, art, and science, which leads to a new figure of the artist and to new kinds of approaches. Tomás Saraceno’s work is a good example. He revisits the figure of the universal Renaissance man (uomo universale), who is no longer universal on his own, but a collaborator. The Argentinian artist surrounds himself with talented people from all disciplines, from the hard sciences to the social sciences and the humanities, by way of architecture, of course, and the creative professions. His creations stem foremost from the creation and work of a collective, which he establishes according to his projects. Leonardo da Vinci, if he were alive today, would be an expert in pluri-, inter- and transdisciplinarity. To use a metaphor, the universal man is now an orchestra conductor.

You often connect the wild to dance. What meaning does this relationship have for you?

I created the concept of concordance by combining concord (agreement, peace, harmony) and dance as a continual movement with alterity. The purpose of the wild is concordance, that is, a kind of collaboration with nature. I consider dance to be an ecological expression, if we understandecology as a way of being in and inhabiting the world. A dancer (I might say, anyone) is never alone. Forces, which are exceedingly difficult to name or quantify, are inevitably presented to him: air, gravity, the resonance of the space, the psychological intensity of third parties, etc., even before one or several (other) partners join him.

For this reason, the dancer cannot arrive with a preconceived idea of dance. He must first “listen”,in order to develop a common code with the alterity that is present, and then constantly adjust himself if he wants to achieve a sustainable, “natural” choreography (there is a possible path here towards the idea of nature). The wild-dancer opens up to the movement of the other who asks to pass into him, in order to harmonise with him. The same goes for the skilled swimmer who incorporates the movements of the sea, absorbs the logic of its forms, regularity, and surprises, in order to flow with it.

I am particularly interested in Contact Improvisation, which the dancer and researcher Romain Bigédevoted a very interesting thesis to. This dance, or rather this practice, inasmuch as it takes place in studios more than on stage, was introduced by Steve Paxton in 1972 and then quickly developed by other “founders”. Influenced by the martial arts and Eastern spiritualities, Contact invites free improvisation, “a certain art of the encounter, that is, the art of doing everything in order for the two partners to move together in such a way that neither imposes movement on the other and at the same time, in such a way that both acquiesce to it. The hope or the idea is that neither one directs and yet both act” .

Evolutionism, developed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and then by Charles Darwin, led us to think of species, not as stable forms, but as processes of speciation. Romain Bigé subtly analyses the fact that a number of philosophies of movement or of becoming have borrowed the general idea that: “[…] things are only the traces of the fundamental movement that composes them. According tothese philosophies, there is no tree: something is tree-ing. There is no space: there are spatialproperties or spatialisations. There is no body: there are shape-takers, embodiments, as there are becoming-humans, becoming-wolves, becoming-poplars, all processes that our methods of apprehending reality prevent us from imagining as becomings and restrict us to seeing only the snapshots of.”

Dance, as an articulation of relationships, is an integral part of ecological thinking (incidentally, it remains a very open field). We can see that it is almost consubstantial to human communities, since Palaeolithic times, and in a great number of cultures across every continent, often associated with questions that were essential to communities (communication with the spirits, healing, hunting, harvesting, war, etc.).

There are new choreographers who are producing creations with flowers, trees, or animals (for example Antonija Livingstone or the collective Dance for Plants). Baroque opera and ballet had already brought animals onstage in order to make manifest the avalanche of energy that brings the world to life (for example in Ezio by Johann Adolph Hasse, in 1730, the triumphal procession included four hundred people, one hundred and two horses, eight mules and eight dromedaries). Whilst contemporary choreographers also call on non-human partners, they nevertheless leave the stage and do not try to train them to obey a pre-written score. They aim to deepen the relationships and to enrich our awareness of living things.

The wild seeks to be part of the dynamic of the anima (one might say, the choreography of movements and transformations in nature that guarantees the conditions of our life on Earth). The development of movement thinking enables it to take part in this. Like contact improvisers play with their weight and their partners’ weight: there is no hierarchy, but attention, care, learning, adaptation, monitoring, and the cultivating of each person’s possibilities for expression. There is no balance to be maintained (imposing stability on an ecosystem can be destructive: the protective environmental measures taken in the Hutcheson Memorial Forest in the United States in 1955 were one example). Balance and imbalance complete each other. Concordance ensures that one never triumphs over the other but that the best conditions are maintained in order for the game to continue.

Movement thinking identifies ways of being in dance. It adds to the gaze that seeks to learn from the world to better engage with it. It asks itself, perhaps on the invitation of Joseph Beuys, who repeatedly used the symbolism of honey, whether we ought not to consider our projects from the point of view of the relationship between the bee and the flower. The flower feeds the bee, whichcontributes in turn to the life of the flower by means of pollination. A dance, like the language of the bee that indicates to its fellow bees the direction and distance to sources of food (the ethologist Karl von Frisch owes his Nobel Prize to this dance). The relationship between the flower and the bee offers a powerful metaphor for inter-species collaboration, for gifts and counter-gifts of different kinds within a network of exchanges whose vibrations propagate themselves from sphere to sphere.

Concordance seems to me to be the occasion to rethink the concept of movement, mirroring the unrest which we are paying such a high price for: from the exhaustion of the body of the homo œconomicus, weighed down by constraints, to the acceleration and intensification of flows and interminglings on a planetary scale which are shaking up our ecosystems’ capacities for adaptation and resilience, with increasingly global and dramatic consequences, as we can see today.

How might this concept of the wild be manifested on the architectural or urban scale?

Architecture was an integral part of the avant-gardes of the Wild pre-renaissance which we mentioned previously (when it was not their very backbone). For the Wild renaissance, a construction is not the work of a single author, the architect (or his agency), but rather a product of what I would call a chain of creation that stretches from the territory to the final user, by way of the architect and the chosen materials: each of these contribute to the form and identity of a construction, considered as a collective process to be maintained over time.

The watchword by the architect and landscaper Ian McHarg, “design with nature” (the title of his seminal book, published in 1969), is more relevant than ever. The method that he describes requires us to identify and consider the sum of the layers that make up a territory: from its biophysical components to its social, historical, cultural, and ethnological characteristics, taking into account its psychogeography and the forms of life it supports. The aim is to uncover the most appropriate actions from all of these properties, in order to achieve, not a static result, but a “dynamic balance”. Ian McHarg quickly understood that the difficulty lies not only in gathering the information, but in integrating it and making it work together, and then in making the decision-makers understand and accept the resulting project.

I devoted a long passage in Renaissance sauvage to the regeneration project in the Ruhr region in Germany: the IBA Emscher Park (1989-1999). What interested me was the approach, the way in which the project was organised and conducted. The plurality of perspectives came not only from a consideration of the territory in all its complexity (from economy to ecology, by way of the social, the cultural, sport, hobbies and tourism), but also of the local communities involved. It was an interesting first step which I believe it is essential for us to develop. A slogan such as “Design with nature” raises the question of who the building or urban project is intended for. The answer cannot be limited to mankind. The research encouraged by Ian McHarg must enable us to identify the sum of the perspectives present in the environment we are working in, with the aim of building for each of them equally. In other words, we ought to consider as users, not only humans, but also living things and the entire typology of the environment we are working in. This indivisible sum is the plural recipient of all architecture. This is an essential dimension.

With regard to materials and construction processes, I analyse in my book how the work of a number of designers, architects, engineers, and scientists resonates with the “practical methodology” of the Wild renaissance: from bricks made of fungal mycelium by Phil Ross/Mycoworks, to bricks made of sand and micro-organisms by Ginger Krieg Dosier/BioMason, by way of the biopolymers by Neri Oxman/MIT Media Lab. The Americans Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello are good examples of this. They explore architectural possibilities as frugal as mud houses or the creation of structures in 3D printed modules from local resources (like the salt from the San Francisco Bay for Saltygloo), or recycled materials. The Italian collective WASP has extended the scale of printing machines to that of whole houses (TECLA house). We must remember that technological innovations can clearly only be part of the conversation once we have integrated the major ecological issues such as soil sealing, the urban sprawl, damage or breakdowns within ecosystems, the carbon footprint of materials and buildings, etc. They must go hand in hand with a preliminary question: is it really necessary to build anything more? And if so, it must be done as a result of more modest architectural processes which are less resource-intensive (from the foundations to the decorative elements).

The unfinished (non-finito) is a philosophical constant in the Wild renaissance. An agency does not deliver a finished building, since nothing can ever be considered to be finished, but something that is called to live, and therefore to evolve, partly unexpectedly. Integrating uncertainty requires light structures that leave as much power as possible to the users, whose diversity we have already mentioned. The architecture of the Wild renaissance, fully aware of the space it is integrated into, does not impose functions so much as it offers a space and a context that are propitious for ecosystemic services and the emergence of creations. In other words, it is not a framework architecture, but an architecture of openness, an architecture which aims to collaborate with present and future forces.

In Renaissance sauvage, I talk about a change of paradigm, from formalism to finalism. “Making something” shifts from “I have a shape in my head that I want to create,” to “I have a purpose that I want to create”. The wild aspires less to an object and more to a quality or a symphony which it seeks to make manifest. It admires less what it does “on its own” than what it helps to bring into the world.

Such a mindset bears witness to the leading role of spirituality and culture in our era’s development in the direction of a renaissance, or otherwise. Consciousness, representation of the world and desire work together and control the aspirations that dictate the markets of society. We know how to live differently, and we are capable of doing so, from a technical point of view. What is lacking is the desire, a desire that would be sufficiently strong to give us the courage to take action.

Faith in the power of an active aesthetic, such as that of John Ruskin and William Morris, has not lost any of its relevance. We must think of architecture as being endowed with a power to make manifest, that is, acknowledge its power of spiritual construction. Architecture is the reflection of a consciousness, and a producer of consciousness. I often think of the Chinese garden and its ability to provide a crossroads of perspectives, in other words, to produce emergence. Designed as a microcosm, it allows the visitor to grow in the intelligence of the relationships, to imagine and to project themselves into a world. It is not a space that obeys a system, it is a space of presences, freedom and creation.