The Fondation Thalie is joining forces with the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris for the 4th season of the Créateurs Urgence Climat lecture series, running from October 2023 to May 2024. In March, the film-maker and visual artist Laura Huertas Millán will be invited to discuss with the anthropologist Jean-Louis Tornatore.
Transition calls for trance, says Jean-Louis Tornatore. So how do we compose “an art of trance for the 21st century”? By turning, perhaps, towards those ways of being in the world – and those artistic practices – that propose a political ecology of knowledge and differences to affirm the reality of a world of many worlds; towards those ways of being in the world that Laura Huertas Millán explores in her practice as a filmmaker and through an eye that is at once feminist, ecological and decolonial. Under her gaze, a psychotropic plant ceases to be an object, a simple product, and becomes a person, opening up the ritual possibility of a collective conversation about neo-colonialism, ecology, activism and more intimate subjects.
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: Laura Huertas Millán, French-Colombian filmmaker and visual artist and Jean-Louis Tornatore, anthropologist, professor at the Université de Bourgogne.
Co-moderated by Chiara Vecchiarelli, curator of the program and Stéphane Degoutin, teacher at École des Arts Décoratifs de Paris, writer, researcher.
Laura Huertas Millán is a Franco-Colombian filmmaker and visual artist whose practice lies at the intersection between cinema, contemporary art and research. She is co-director of the Film/Video Chair at Bard College in New York. Her films have won awards at the Locarno Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Doclisboa and Videobrasil, among others. Her most recent solo exhibitions have been at MASP Sao Paulo, Maison des Arts de Malakoff and the Museum of Modern Art in Medellin. Her films have also been exhibited and screened in art institutions (Centre Pompidou Paris, Jeu de Paume, Guggenheim Museum NY). They form part of private and public collections (Kadist, CNAP, Banco de la República de Colombia, CIFO, FRAC Lorraine, etc.). Huertas Millan holds a practical doctorate on ‘Ethnographic Fictions’ developed between PSL University (SACRe programme) and the Sensory Ethnography Lab (Harvard University). Since 2019, she has been part of the curatorial and research collective Counter Encounters, which has developed projects at the Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern.
Jean-Louis Tornatore is an anthropologist and Professor at the University of Bourgogne. He is the author of Pas de transition sans transe. Essai d’écologie politique des savoirs, Bellevaux, Éditions Dehors, October 2023. He is working to deconstruct the category of heritage “before” the Anthropocene. In 2017 he co-initiated a political ecology workshop committed to a critical and speculative approach to transitions. He was a member of the Laboratoire d’anthropologie et d’histoire de l’institution de la culture (IIac/Lahic, Cnrs-Ehess-Ministère de la culture, Paris) and an associate member of Shadyc (Sociologie, histoire et anthropologie des dynamiques culturelles, Cnrs-Ehess, Marseille). Her empirical research focuses on the heritage status of industrial remains, through their conversion into monuments or ‘cultural wastelands’, and on forms of heritage commitment in situations of loss. He recently worked with Perrine Alranq, an actress, clown and researcher (La Fabrique Sauvage), to create L’Occident désorienté, a spectacular show in which an anthropologist and a clown come together to explore the possibility of ‘transforming’ the West.
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
