As part of the 4th season of the Créateurs Urgence Climat programme, the Fondation Thalie has joined forces with the École des Arts Décoratifs de Paris (October 2023 to May 2024) to invite artist Anaïs Tondeur to discuss with environmental anthropology researcher Marine Legrand.
On this occasion, they will explore the relationship between the biosphere and bodily fluids – such as milk, blood and tears – from an ecofeminist perspective that lies at the crossroads between art, anthropology and ecology. Tonder and Legrand invite us to think about the relationship between these fluids that circulate between living beings and their environment, and to reconfigure our understanding of the interrelationships that run through living things. Through artistic practice and writing, they approach the invention of rituals around these fluids as a link between poetic practice and politics, opening up the possibility of a new ethic.
Created in 2020 by the Fondation Thalie, this series of conversations between artists, designers and scientists committed to a post-carbon society aims to pass on new thinking and knowledge to inspire a whole new generation of creators, to invent imaginaries of transition, and to design and implement new ways of producing in the light of depleting natural resources. The great ecological challenge of our time.
Guests: Anaïs Tondeur, artist, and Marine Legrand, environmental anthropology researcher.
Moderated by Chiara Vecchiarelli, curator of the program.
Anaïs Tondeur‘s artistic practice is rooted in an ecological approach. Composing a kind of laboratory of attentions, she develops her work through investigation and fiction, presented in the form of walks, installations, photographs or protocols associated with alchemy. Through worlds that implode, she questions the deep interdependencies that link our human existence to the fabric of the living world, using images developed in a mode of production that is as close as possible to and respectful of the environments in which we live, by means of photographic protocols, sensitive experiments or speculative narratives, presented in the form of installations or collective surveys. She is a graduate of Central Saint Martin (2008) and the Royal College of Arts (2010) in London, winner of the Art of Change 21 Prize and recipient of the Cyber Arts Honourable Mention, Ars Electronica (2019), and has presented and exhibited her work in international institutions such as the Centre Pompidou (Paris – FR), Serpentines Galleries (London – UK), Bozar (Brussels – BE), Pavillon français “Lieux Infinis* Biennale Di Venezia (Venezia – IT).
Marine Legrand is a researcher in environmental anthropology, in charge of research and coordination at the École des Ponts Paris Tech / Laboratoire Eau, Environnement, Systèmes Urbains. Her research focuses on the ecologisation of spatial planning practices in a post-industrial context. She is interested in the knowledge and imagination associated with the emergence of alternative practices, the rethinking of existing infrastructures, and the dialogue between informal uses and institutional approaches. The thread that runs through her work is the nourishing links between humans and other living things: from the intimate to the planetary, from bodily fluids to biogeochemical cycles and the rhythms of the biosphere. At the École des Ponts, she worked mainly on ecological sanitation and the return of human excreta to the soil as fertiliser, at the crossroads between agricultural issues and the protection of aquatic environments. She spent ten years working on biodiversity management at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle.
Based on a curatorial proposal by Fondation Thalie, this fourth season hosted at the École des Arts Décoratifs is organised by Chiara Vecchiarelli, coordinator of the programme Creators facing the climate emergency, in co-construction with Patrick Laffont-DeLojo, teacher in stage design at the École des Arts Décoratifs.
In partnership with the École des Arts Décoratifs de Paris
