Lecture by Frederique Äit-Touati (FR) & Duncan Evennou (FR).
In this talk, the evolving relationship between Earth, theatre, and cartography is explored in light of contemporary ecological crises. Earth is positioned as a dynamic actor rather than a passive backdrop, suggesting that theatre can serve as a laboratory to examine the changing interaction with the environment. Earth emerges as a central performer in a new global narrative, engaging with crises that spotlight ecological and geopolitical issues. The classical definition of landscape is that it is a portion of the territory, it’s what can be seen from a viewpoint. In this talk, we will try to understand how we have shifted from vision to other means of perception: it’s a transformation of the gaze, but even more, a transformation of the position of the body, a widening of the perceptual tools, a move from optics to haptics. What emerges is a new definition of the concept of landscape: as an inhabited territory, as a model of human-nature performance on a common ground, which they build together.
Bios
Frédérique Aït-Touati is a historian of science, a theatre director, and a CNRS Research Professor in Paris. Her interests include early modern literature, astronomy, and the sciences of the Earth, from the seventeenth through the twenty first centuries, including cartography, cosmography, and ecology/environmentalism. Her books include Fictions of the Cosmos (Chicago University Press, 2011), Contes de la Lune, essai sur la fiction et la science modernes (Gallimard, 2011), Terra Forma, a book of speculative maps (MIT Press, 2019), Théâtres du monde (2024).
Duncan Evennou was born in 1988 and is a French performer and director. In 2012, he graduated from the ‘Ecole Nationale Supérieur d’Art Dramatique du Théâtre National de Bretagne’ under the direction of Stanislas Nordey. A graduate of SPEAP, the experimental arts and politics programme at Sciences Po Paris with Bruno Latour, he is now developing interdisciplinary work on the fringes of drama, sociology and visual art around three major dynamics: creation, research and teaching. He works primarily with authors, stage directors, radio directors, choreographers and visual artists whose aesthetics are resolutely contemporary, including Frédérique Ait Touati, Emilie Rousset, Stanislas Nordey, Bruno Latour, Lancelot Hamelin, Ulla Von Brandenburg, Ivana Muller, Pauline Simon, Aude Lachaise, Joris Lacoste, Nadia Vonder Heyden and Sophie Aude Picon. Evennou is artistic director of the Lighthouse Company, which he set up in 2018 in Paris and with which he has created 6 shows. It explores different theatrical and performative modes of creation on contemporary subjects. He also teaches performance art at the Karlsruhe School of Fine Arts and is a doctoral candidate at Teesside University in art and ecology.
