Creators facing Climate Emergency: Fernando García-Dory and Xenia Chiaramonte

For the 4th season of “Créateurs Urgence Climat” (October 2023 – May 2024), the Foundation is inviting artist and agroecologist Fernando García-Dory and jurist Xenia Chiaramonte to discuss agroecology and the New Imaginaries of Law.

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.

The full series of conversations is now available as an audio podcast!

Guests :  Fernando García-Dory, artist and agroecologist et Xenia Chiaramonte, jurist
Co-moderated by Chiara Vecchiarelli, curator of the programme, and Patrick Laffont de Lojo, scenography teacher at the École des Arts Décoratifs Paris.

How can we understand a territory from the inside, and thwart the illusion of a technosphere always already separated from nature? How can the human technique of law become compatible with a situated ecological approach? Agroecologist artist Fernando García-Dory and Gaia jurist Xenia Chiaramonte question our artistic and legal imaginaries at the heart of an evolving world, in order to invite us to rethink at the same time biopower as a capacity to “self-organize according to criteria such as care and affection” – criteria to which rurality offers a concrete field of experimentation – and art and law as two practices called to actively engage in favor of a renewed understanding of the categories which govern our actions.

Fernando García-Dory is an artist whose work engages specifically with the relationship between culture and nature now, as manifested in multiple contexts, from landscape and the rural, to desires and expectations in relation to identity, through (global) crisis, utopia and the potential for social change. Interested in the harmonic complexity of biological forms and processes, his work addresses connections and cooperation, from microorganisms to social systems, and from traditional art languages drawing to collaborative agroecological projects and actions, and cooperatives. He studied Fine Arts and Rural Sociology, and is now preparing his PhD on Agroecology. He has developed projects and shown his work at Tensta Konsthalle, Van Abbemuseum, Reina Sofia Museum, Documenta 12 and Biennales of Gwangju, Istanbul and Athens.

Xenia Chiaramonte is a researcher working primarily on the potential of legal techniques in the time of Gaia. As a thinker but also as an activist, she interrogates the potential of legal imagination in the service of environmental catastrophes and climate breakdown, standing for a situated and pragmatic approach rather than one based on the logic of the universal. She is an affiliated scholar of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. Interested social struggles and law, she published the book Governing conflict: The Criminalization of the No TAV Movement (Governare il conflitto: La criminalizzazione del movimento No TAV, 2019) on the political trials against activists in the context of one of the most important and longstanding environmental movements in Europe. She is also experimenting with the genre of science fiction as well—of a special kind that could be thought of “botanical sci-fi” which began with Greetings from the Undergrowth (published on eflux).

Practical information

Based on a curatorial proposal by Fondation Thalie, this third 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