Environmental History III

Alessandro Stanziani is a professor at the EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) and a senior researcher at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifiques), Paris. He is the author of fourteen monographs, ten edited volumes, and more than one hundred articles. His books include Rules of Exchange: French Capitalism in Comparative Perspective; Eighteenth to Early Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Bâtisseurs d’empires. Russie, Chine et Inde à la croisée des mondes (Liber, 2012).

Bas Smets, born in 1975 in Belgium, is a landscape architect with a multidisciplinary background that has shaped his unique approach to creating innovative and sustainable urban spaces. He founded his firm in 2007 in Brussels which has since built over 50 international projects, including the LUMA Parc des Ateliers in Arles, the Thurn & Taxis Park in Brussels, the Sunken Garden in London, and the Himara Waterfront in Albania. In 2022, Smets won the prestigious international competition to redesign the public space surrounding Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. 

Smets' approach is characterized by his concept of "Augmented Landscapes," which utilizes natural processes to create new microclimates. He often collaborates with artists and scientists, reflecting his commitment to interdisciplinary innovation.

2023, Smets was appointed Professor in Practice at the Graduate School of Design of Harvard University, where he continues to explore inventive ways to transform urban environments into ecological systems capable of mitigating climate change. His visionary approach to landscape architecture offers a promising path forward for making cities more resilient to the challenges of the climate crisis.

Benoît Piéron is an artist who spent a large part of his childhood in the hospital, a place he has to frequent again today. At the age of forty, he has transformed a tamed illness into a potential for action. Resident artist at the Pinault Collection in Lens, the Fondation Hermès, and the Casa de Velázquez, he has exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo and the Chisenhale Gallery in London, and he has been nominated for the Ricard prize. In his sculptures, patchworks, and installations, which often borrow their pastel colors from hospital linen, he has developed a body of work in which the medical world is transformed into an intimate reverie, a reflection on waiting, the garden, and sensuality—a hallucinatory and uncertain inner journey.

Diana Campbell is a curator who has been working in South and Southeast Asia since 2010, primarily in India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. She is committed to fostering a transnational art world, and her plural and long-range vision addresses the concerns of underrepresented regions and artists alongside the more established in manifold forums. Since 2013, she has served as the Founding Artistic Director of Dhaka-based Samdani Art Foundation, Bangladesh, and Chief Curator of the Dhaka Art Summit, leading the critically acclaimed 2014–2023 editions and planning the upcoming 2026 edition. In addition to her exhibition-making practice, Campbell is responsible for developing the Samdani Art Foundation collection and is driving its international collaborations ahead of the 2025 opening of the foundation’s permanent home, Srihatta, the Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park in Sylhet. Concurrent to her work in Bangladesh from 2016–2018, Campbell was also the Founding Artistic Director of Bellas Artes Projects in the Philippines, a non-profit international residency and exhibition program with sites in Manila and Bataan. She is currently also Head of Global Initiatives of the Hartwig Art Foundation in Amsterdam, and serves on the Facilitation Group of AFIELD, a transnational network supporting artists as social changemakers.

Estelle Rouquette is a Doctor of Art History and Archeology. As Assistant Director of the Camargue Regional Nature Park, she organizes cultural projects, heritage, architecture, landscape, energy, and environmental education and awareness. She is also the Director of the Camargue Museum.

Feda Wardak is a French Afghan artist, architect, and researcher based in Paris. His work focuses on the impact of imperialist and capitalist dynamics on inhabited environments. He works on the effects of armed conflict in Afghan tribal areas, the destruction of housing estates in France, water management policies, and the consequences of extractivism on landscapes and bodies. His artistic devices allow interventions in landscapes to reveal the violence that acts upon them. This often-invisible structural violence is gradually contributing to the pollution, transformation, and disappearance of entire ecosystems. Faced with these emergency situations, Feda Wardak distinguishes between what is “fair” and what is “legal.” The artistic works he deploys are defended as tools of jurisprudence that attempt to displace the legal framework. His work has been presented at various biennials (Venice, Dhaka, Chicago, Lagos, Lyon, etc.) and exhibitions (MAC VAL, FRAC Grand Large, Ateliers Médicis, etc.), but he feels that it is above all in the public space that he has presented his most accomplished creations.

Grégory Quenet is one of the pioneers of environmental history and humanities in France. Since 2012, he has been, and still is, the first and only professor in environmental history in France, at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (Paris-Saclay). Founder of the French Environmental Humanities Platform, he organized the 8th Congress of the European Society for Environmental History in Versailles in 2015.

Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, and Senior Advisor at LUMA Arles. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show “World Soup : The Kitchen Show” in 1991, he has curated more than 350 shows.

 Obrist’s recent publications include Ways of Curating (2015), The Age of Earthquakes (2015), Lives of the Artists, Lives of Architects (2015), Mondialité (2017), Somewhere Totally Else (2018) The Athens Dialogues (2018), Maria Lassnig: Letters (2020), Entrevistas Brasileiras: Volume 2 (2020), and 140 Ideas for Planet Earth (2021).

Hashim Sarkis is an architect, educator, and scholar. He is principal of Hashim Sarkis Studios (HSS), established in 1998 with offices in Boston and Beirut. He is also the Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since 2015 and was the director/curator of the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. Before joining MIT, Sarkis was the Aga Khan Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism at Harvard University. The architectural and urban projects of HSS include affordable housing, houses, parks, institutional buildings, urban design, and town planning. HSS has received several awards for its projects including for the Housing of the Fishermen of Tyre, Byblos Town Hall, and the Courtower Houses. The firm’s work has been exhibited around the world, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the biennales of Venice, Rotterdam, Shenzhen/Hong Kong, and Valparaiso. The work has also been published extensively, including in a monograph by NESS.docs. Sarkis earned a Bachelor of Architecture and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a Master of Architecture and a PhD in Architecture from Harvard University. He is author, co-author, and editor of several books and articles on modern architecture history and theory, including The World as an Architectural Project; Josep Lluís Sert: The Architect of Urban Design; Circa 1958, Lebanon in the Projects and Plans of Constantinos Doxiadis; and Le Corbusier's Venice Hospital.

Hélène Blais is a Professor of Contemporary History at the École Normale Supérieure-PSL and a member of the Institut d’histoire moderne et contemporaine. Her work is on the relationship between knowledge and colonial empires, as well as on cartography, geography, and travel in the nineteenth century and, in recent years, on the environmental history of colonization. Her publications include Mirages de la carte. L’invention de l’Algérie coloniale (Fayard, 2014) and Voyages au grand océan. Géographies du Pacifique et colonisation, 1815-1845 (CTHS, 2005), and she has co-edited numerous publications and was co-curator of the exhibition Visages de l’exploration au XIXe siècle. Du mythe à l’histoire, held at the BNF in 2022. Her latest book is L’Empire de la nature. Une histoire des jardins botaniques coloniaux, fin XVIIIe siècle-années 1930 (Champ Vallon, 2023).

Since 2016, Hélène Guenin has been director of the Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain (MAMAC) in Nice, where she notably organized the exhibition Gustav Metzger: Remember Nature (2017). She was in charge of programming at the Centre Pompidou-Metz between 2008 and 2016, with exhibitions including Sublime, les tremblements du monde (2016) and Une brève histoire des lignes with Christian Briend (2013).

Laura Huertas Millán is an artist, filmmaker, and writer from Colombia, based in France. She holds a PhD from PSL University (SACRe program), developed at the Sensory Ethnography Lab (Harvard University). More than twenty film retrospectives of her work have been held internationally. Her films have been shown in leading world cinema festivals and won prizes at the Locarno Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Doclisboa, and Videobrasil. She has had solo exhibitions at the MASP São Paulo, Maison des Arts de Malakoff, and Medellin’s Modern Art Museum. Her films have also been exhibited and screened at the Centre Pompidou, Jeu de Paume, Guggenheim Museum in New York, Times Art Center Berlin, and presented in festivals such as the Liverpool Biennial, FRONT Triennial, Videobrasil, Videonale, and Sharjah Biennial.

Leanne Dmyterko is a London-based Curator who has acted as Co-Director of the Gustav Metzger Foundation for the past seven years. For nearly a decade, she collaborated closely with Metzger on projects and exhibitions worldwide and now continues his work through the Foundation. She has written on his life and art for various publications and co-curated several solo exhibitions of his work, including an upcoming exhibition at Kunsthal Aarhus (2025), with past exhibitions at the Ben Uri Gallery (London, 2021), West (The Hague, 2017), and Kabuso (Norway, 2017).

Maïa Tellit Hawad is a French-Tuareg researcher based in Marseille. Trained as a philosopher, her research revolves around the imaginary of the Sahara in French Africanist sciences and the intersection of colonial, racial, and geographical logics within the current administration of the central Sahara. Her recent work focuses on nomadic becomings in contemporary Tuareg societies. She currently teaches in the research studio RS6 – Saharan Becomings in the Environmental Architecture program of the Royal College of Art in London.

Maya Lin is an environmental artist. She interprets the natural world through science, history, and culture to create works that have had a profound impact on how we view our history and how we relate to the natural world. From her very first work—the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—she has since gone on to a career in both art and architecture, whilst still remaining committed to memory works that focus on some of the critical historical issues of our time. Her work ranges from site-specific art installations, such as Ghost Forest at Madison Square Park in New York, to projects like the library at Smith College and Novartis’s campus headquarters in Cambridge, MA. Currently, her projects include the new performing arts lab space for Bard College and a new design for the Museum of Chinese in America in downtown Manhattan, New York. Lin is a member of the Bloomberg Foundation and the What is Missing? Foundation. She is also a National Geographic Explorer at Large, and in 2016, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Mohamed Amer Meziane is a philosopher and Assistant Professor at the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University. He is the author of an acclaimed PhD dissertation on secularization as an effect of the “colonial encounter.” His work also explores the genealogy of the extractivism of contemporary “fossil states” and calls for a decolonial metaphysics embodied in an ecology that takes into account “that which exceeds” the Earth, thus going beyond the ontological turn of anthropology. He is the author of The States of the Earth: An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization, which won the Albertine Prize for non-fiction in 2023 after its French publication in 2021, was translated into English, and will be published by Verso in April 2024. His second book is titled At the Edge of the Worlds: Towards a Metaphysical Anthropology (Au bord des mondes, 2023), and he has written many articles for international magazines of the Global North and South. He is also a member of the editorial board of the journal Multitudes.

Natalia Fedorova is an artist, curator, researcher, and educator in the field of contemporary art and literature. Her work is centered around mediation between human languages, technology, and ecosystems. Fedorova’s latest art pieces can be classified as interspecies communicators. To be the wind for the tree translates the physiological processes of trees into poetic lines; To Bee is a semiotic simulator that allows us to create a basis for a common human and bee umwelt. Currently, Fedorova is a guest researcher at the Laboratory for the Research and Study of Contemporary Approaches to Philosophy at Paris 8 University, supported by the PAUSE program. She is teaching technological art and experimental writing in Smolny Beyond Borders.

Patrick Boucheron has been a professor at the Collège de France, holding the Histoire des pouvoirs en Europe occidentale, XIIIe-XVIe siècle chair, since 2015. He has formulated concepts such as political fictions and political experiences, around which he seeks to reconfigure a history of power since the Middle Ages. At the same time, he has been reflecting on the writing and epistemology of history, attempting to articulate literature and the social sciences on the basis of a number of collective projects as well as personal experiments. Author of numerous works, he has notably written Quand l’histoire fait dates. Dix manières de créer l’événement; La Trace et l’Aura. Vies posthumes d’Ambroise de Milan (IVe-XVIe siècles); and Prendre dates. Paris, January 6–January 14, 2015, with Mathieu Riboulet; Faire profession d’historien; and he edited Histoire du monde au XVe siècle in 2012 and Histoire mondiale de la France in 2018. A member of the editorial board of L’Histoire magazine since 1999, the scientific council of the Rendez-vous de l’Histoire in Blois, and the scientific council of the Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée (Mucem, Marseille) since 2013, Boucheron was appointed chairman of the scientific committee in charge of redesigning the permanent gallery at the Musée national d’histoire de l’immigration in 2017.

Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou were in residence at LUMA Arles from october 2017 to march 2018.

Respectively born in 1989 and 1988, in Toulouse, France. They live and work in Paris. Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou are a curator duo based in Paris. In May 2018, they curated the ‘Cruising Pavilion’ exhibition at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, interrogating the relationship between minority sexual practices and architecture. A second iteration of their curatorial project was exhibited at Ludlow 38, in New York, in February 2019, and the third and last edition took place at ArkDes in Stockholm, Sweden, in the fall of 2019. In September 2018, they were the curators of a group exhibition on neo-liberal baroque at Converso, Milan. They often contribute to magazines such as Flash Art and L’Officiel Art.

Raphaëlle Guidée is a lecturer in comparative literature at the University of Poitiers and a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). Her research focuses on the intersection between literature and the social sciences, the political dimension of contemporary writing, and the environmental humanities. Her project at Institut Universitaire de France is entitled “Losing the World: Climate Change, Historical Transitions and New Narratives” (2020–2025). She has published an essay on the memory of disasters (Mémoires de l’oubli, 2017) and co-edited several volumes on contemporary literature (Hantologies, 2009; Patrick Modiano, 2012; W. G. Sebald, 2013; Utopie et catastrophe, 2015; Dire les inégalités, 2016; and L’Apocalypse, une imagination politique, 2018). Her narrative investigation into the story of Detroit’s bankruptcy will be published in 2024 by Flammarion.

Samir Boumediene is a CNRS researcher at the Institut d’histoire des représentations et des idées dans les modernités (Lyon) and has previously held postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute (Berlin) and the University of Cambridge. His PhD, completed at the University of Lorraine and Casa de Velázquez (Madrid), was devoted to the history of medicinal plants in the New World and was published in 2016 under the title The Colonization of Knowledge (La colonisation du savoir. Une histoire des plantes médicinales du « Nouveau Monde » [1492-1750], Vaulx-en-Velin, Éditions des Mondes à faire, 2016). He has subsequently published several articles on the history of drugs, medicine, and plants. His current research, begun at the Villa Medici and the Dutch Institute in Rome, and which he is pursuing as a fellow at I Tatti (the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence), focuses on the notion of discovery in the early modern period and on the history of questionnaires.

Tarek El-Ariss is the James Wright Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. Born and raised in Beirut during the Civil War (1975–1990) and trained in philosophy, literary theory, and visual and cultural studies at the American University of Beirut, the University of Rochester, and Cornell University, his work deals with questions of displacement, war, and desire. He has written about disoriented travelers, outcasts, queers, hackers, and characters with complicated relationships to home and power. He is the author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (Fordham, 2013) and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age (Princeton, 2019), and editor of The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda (MLA, 2018). His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, and Choice. In 2021, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete his forthcoming book, Water on Fire: A Memoir of War.

Botanist and Tropical Agronomy Engineer. Her professional career has been primarily in the public sector, for the Pont du Gard site, the Occitanie Region, and the Nîmes-Métropole agglomeration.

Zairong Xiang is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Associate Director of Art at Duke Kunshan University. His research, teaching, and curatorial practices engage with cosmology and cosmopolitanism in their culturally diverse, historically specific, and conceptually promiscuous manifestations in English, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Nahuat. He was co-curator of the 2021 Guangzhou Image Triennial; Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World) at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin); and the 14th Shanghai Biennale, Cosmos Cinema (2023–2024); among many other projects. He is the author of Queer Ancient Ways: A Decolonial Exploration (2018). He is currently completing his second book, “Transdualism,” which engages closely with theories of ying-yang and the body in Daoism and Chinese medicine as conceptual interventions in contemporary debates around gender/sexuality, the arts, and knowledge decolonization. His writings and lectures can be accessed here: www.xiangzairong.com