Central stage
Free admission while places last
Contemporary art has attempted on more than one occasion to produce a new map of the relationship binding all living species together, transcending both our obsession with genealogy and the taxonomic meticulousness of biology. The various species of animal, plant and fungus that populate the planet are no longer one before the other, one outside the other, one alongside the other: they are life experiments that each species conducts within the other's body. Pierre Huyghe's Human Mask is the most radical reflection on this aspect: each species is a walking zoo and each identity is nothing but a mask through which life attempts to live differently from that which it is.
Emanuele Coccia lectures at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. His publications, translated into several languages, include Sensible Life (2011), The Life of Plants (2018) and, more recently, Philosophy of the Home (2021). In 2019 he was scientific advisor to the exhibition Nous les Arbres held at the Fondation Cartier in Paris