[PART 2] Mapping a New Earth: Cartographic and Performative Tools of Exploration

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.

The Museum For Contemporary Nature

Emanuele Coccia (IT).

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