TYPE OF ACTIVITY: Event

Lecture by Emanuele Coccia. The lecture is part of the Life Terrains series. Introduction by Nikolaj Schultz.

Humans were able to develop a stable relationship with the land and abandon the hunter-gatherer lifestyle only when some communities decided to faithfully and stably tie their existence to a relatively small number of trees and shrubs that could provide them with food and shelter. This is how the first city was born: it was this strange act of spatial fidelity to plant life that gave rise to the urban environment.

This means that the relationship between different species is not tangentially urban. It is the original urban fact. If this is true, then what we call the countryside is a form of urbanism in which, in addition to the number of people and stones, we also have to conceive how many plants should exist, which ones, how fast they should grow, and so on.

Consequently, any form of opposition between city and countryside (or wilderness”) is illusory. The solution to climate change is not to replace cities with the countryside or “wilderness,” but to design cities more radically: to extend the culture of urban congestion to a culture of species congestion and biodiversity density. In this way, we can turn the city into a contemporary nature museum that never stops redesigning a new planetary interspecies density

Biography

Emanuele Coccia is Associate Professor at the EHESS in Paris He is the author of e.g., The Life of Plants (2018), Metamorphosis (2021) and Philosophy of the Home (2024). His books are translated into several languages. He collaborated with many artists. He recently published a photo-theory book with Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen (Modern Alchemy, 2022), a philosophical epistolary on light with photographer Paolo Roversi (Lettres sur la lumières, 2024) and a book on the relationship between fashion and philosophy with Valentino’s creative director Alessandro Michele (The Life of forms. Philosophy or Re-enchantment, 2024).

He co-directed animation videos such as Quercus (2019, with Formafantasma) and Heaven in Matter (2021), an exhibition on fashion (The Many Lives of a Garment, ITS Trieste) and a show on art and ecology (Dancing with All, 21 Century Museum Kanazawa, together with Yuko Hasegawa). In 2024 he was recipient of The Mondrian Prize.

//Centre for Emerging Landscapes.