For the 4th season of “Créateurs Urgence Climat” (October 2023 – May 2024), the Foundation invites biomaterials expert and designer Maurizio Montalti to discuss with starred chef Christian Sinicropi to adress the topic of “Acting and thinking like a mushroom: « with nature, for nature and as nature »”
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: Maurizio Montalti, biomaterials expert and designer and Christian Sinicropi, starred chef.
Moderated by Chiara Vecchiarelli, curator of the program and Patrick Laffont-DeLojo, teacher in stage design at the École des Arts Décoratifs.
Michelin-starred chef Christian Sinicropi and biomaterials expert and designer Maurizio Montalti will come together around a shared commitment: to start from the living and produce differently, in a world of symbiosis and synergy. Christian Sinicropi is a humanist whose vision starts from the land, who takes his roots through cuisine and, with it, carries out research into the living world. He is now supporting the start-up Mycophyto in the development of a technology that aims to reduce the environmental footprint of crops thanks to the natural synergy between plant roots and micro-fungi capable of creating genuine natural irrigation systems underground. Maurizio Montalti’s pioneering work in the research and development of mycelium-based technologies and the production of biomaterials invites us to conceive of the relationship between humans and non-humans as a dynamic ecosystem that runs through the living. For both, the relationship with mushrooms conveys a message of relational coherence at the heart of a way of thinking about the living that teaches us, above all, to conceive of relationships as ecological gestures.
Christian Sinicropi is an ambassador of French and Provençal gastronomy who spent a large part of his career at the Hôtel Martinez, which he joined in 1989 as a clerk. He then left for Biarritz to the Hôtel du Palais then to Strasbourg to the Buerehiesel. Very quickly his talent was recognized by great Chefs, he joined Alain Ducasse at the Louis XV restaurant at the Hôtel de Paris in Monaco. In 2001 he returned to the La Palme d’Or restaurant in Cannes at the Hôtel Martinez where he became Chef de cuisine. Described as a “true artist” by the gastronomic critic Jean-Luc Petitrenaud, his imaginative and inspired work is rewarded with 2 stars in the Michelin Guide and a score of 17/20 in Gault-Millau.
Maurizio Montalti is a designer, researcher, educator and entrepreneur. Working at the junction of design and biotech, he is one of the early pioneers committed to the study and development of wide-ranging mycelium-based technologies and products. Maurizio is Founder and Director of the design-research practice Officina Corpuscoli (NL), and Chief Mycelium Officer, Chairman, and co-Founder of SQIM, the (bio)technology company developing innovative processes and products by unravelling the potential of mycelium as key biofabrication agent and technology, for application and use across different industries, as fundamentally rooted in the valorisation of residual materials’ streams by means of microbial fermentation.
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
