Environmental History III

Friday, May 24 to Sunday, May 26, 2024
Theme: Far from the garden
Place: Le Magasin Électrique

Environmental history investigates the interactions between humans and the “natural world,” focusing on how non-human entities and multispecies ecologies can transform the understanding of agency in historic and current narratives. 

Starting from the premise that industrial societies have profoundly damaged landscapes and ecosystems, Far From the Garden will explore an important question: What can emerge in our damaged landscapes when the increasing impermeability of soil, global-scale urbanism and densification, and vast deforestation are existentially at odds with the idea of a garden as a designed landscape of mediation between nature and culture?

According to landscape architect Bas Smets, who transformed the industrial brownfield of the Parc des Ateliers into a vast public park, in the context of urban history, the development of gardens can be considered as a space that folds in on itself, like a hortus conclusus, a medieval walled garden. This conception of the garden as an enclosed space is in opposition to an exterior landscape that expands beyond strict boundaries.

Today, the idea of a space in extension, rather than fragmented and compartmentalized, allows us to rethink the garden and its role in contemporary society. Drawing upon diverse fields of research, the third edition of Environmental History, Far From the Garden, will explore the various entanglements between nature and culture that shape contemporary narratives and probe the potential of alternative epistemologies to challenge conventional ideas about the garden.

With Mohamed Amer Meziane (Philosopher, Brown University), Hélène Blais (Historian, École normale supérieure), Patrick Boucheron (Historian, Collège de France), Samir Boumediene (Historian, CNRS), Maïa Hawad (Philosopher, independent curator), Tarek El-Ariss (Writer and scholar, Dartmouth College), Natalia Fedorova (Artist and curator), Raphaëlle Guidée (literature Theorist, Université de Poitiers), Maya Lin (environmental Artist), Grégory Quenet (Historian, Université de Versailles), Bas Smets (landscape Architect, Harvard University), Alessandro Stanziani (Historian, EHESS, CNRS), and Zairong Xiang (literature Theorist, Duke Kunshan University).

Program

Free entrance (upon booking)
Note: All conferences are simultaneously translated (FR > EN). 

Friday, May 24, 2024
 

• 5:30 p.m.: Opening remarks
   
• 5:45 p.m.: Conference
  With Grégory Quenet, Professor of Environmental History, University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines
   
• 6:15 p.m.: Conference
  With Patrick Boucheron, PhD, Professor at the Collège de France
   
• 7:00 p.m.: Book launch of SPF 666: Gótico Provençal  Round table with writers and curators Diana Campbell, Pierre-Alexandre Mateos, and Charles Teyssou
   

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Saturday, May 25, 2024
 

• From 9:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.: Workshop — To Be the Wind for the Tree: Generative Poetry Lab
  With Natalia Fedorova, artist and curator

  The workshop will be based on sensors and an interface that translates the physiological parameters of a tree into four lines of minimal poetry. Participants will start by observing the trees during a walk, then they will be introduced to the Tree Talker data collection system (sap flow, accelerometer, temperature and humidity of the trunk and the soil, spectrometer) and the translation principle and will create their own lines of text. The results of the workshop will be presented in the form of a grove of generative poem-trees on the web. 

   

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• 2:15 p.m.: Opening remarks
    
• 2:30 p.m.: Natures of Empire: Colonial Botanical Gardens
  With Hélène Blais, PhD, Professor of Contemporary History at the École Normale Supérieure-PSL
   

• 3:15 p.m.: The Parc des Ateliers as an Experimental Garden
  Conversation with Bas Smets, landscape architect, Professor at Harvard University, and Véronique Mure, botanist and tropical agronomy engineer

• 4:00 p.m.: Break
   
• 4:15 p.m.: Screening of The Labyrinth (21 min, 2018)
  Directed by Laura Huertas Millán, artist 

  
  A voyage into the labyrinthine memories of Cristobal Gomez Abel, who worked for the drug lords in the Colombian Amazon during the 1980s. The film follows his journey through the forest and the ruins of a narco’s mansion, inspired by the Carrington mansion in the soap opera Dynasty, as it unravels the hallucinatory narrative of a near-death experience.

• 4:30 p.m.: History Takes Place beneath our Feet: Philosophy of Subterranean Worlds
  With Mohamed Amer Meziane, PhD, philosopher, Assistant Professor at the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University

• 5:15 p.m.: Break
   
• 5:30 p.m.: The (Queer) Flourishing of Ten Thousand Things
  With Xiang Zairong, PhD, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Associate Director of Art at Duke Kunshan University
   

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Sunday, May 26, 2024 
 

• 10:00 a.m.: Mireille’s Itinerary
  With the École nationale de paysage, Estelle Rouquette, Curator of the Camargue Museum and Véronique Mure, botanist, tropical agronomy engineer
   
• 10:30 a.m.: The Garden by the Sea
  With Tarek El-Ariss, PhD, James Wright Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College
   
• 11:15 a.m.: Break
   
• 11:30 a.m.: Conference
  With Maïa Hawad, independent researcher, guest lecturer in Environmental Architecture at the Royal College of Art, London
   
• 12:15 p.m.: Reclaiming Common Places: From the Cabins of the Bondy Forest to the Urban Gardens of Detroit
  Discussion with Feda Wardak, architect and independent researcher, and Raphaëlle Guidée, literary theorist, University of Poitiers
   

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• 1:00 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.: Break
   
• 2:30 p.m.: Conference
  With Samir Boumediene, PhD, historian, CNRS, Institute of History of Representations and Ideas in Modernity
   
• 3:15 p.m.: Seeds of the World: Cereal Seeds; From Food Civilizations to GMOs
  With Alessando Stanziani, PhD, Director of Studies at the EHESS and CNRS
   
• 4:00 p.m.: Conference
  With Maya Lin, environmental artist
   
• 4:30 p.m.: Homage to Gustav Metzger
  Round table with Hélène Guenin, Director of the MAMAC Nice, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Senior Advisor at LUMA Arles, and Benoît Piéron, artist
   

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• 5:30 p.m.: A visit to the tinctorial Atelier LUMA garden (Session 1 translated in English)



• 6:00 p.m.: A visit to the tinctorial Atelier LUMA garden (Session 2 in French only)

Environmental History symposium I
Thursday, August 25 to Friday, August 26, 2022

How do societies develop their understanding of the environment through processes of interdependency? Why is it important to analyze the past and present of our environmental thinking at this moment in time? How can we reposition the notion of non-human agents— whether these be animals, forests, soil, air, or bacteria—as key protagonists in historical processes? 

Replay of the conferences

Environmental History symposium II
From Saturday, May 27 to Sunday, May 28, 2023

For its second edition, the Environmental History symposium asked the questions: Which narratives, which poetics and which history for the Earth? These problematics will frame the different approaches to understanding fragile ecosystems, land use, and the ways in which these environments were perceived historically through poetry and prose.

Replay of the conferences