Invited to take part in the 12th edition of the Salon Art Genève 2024 to present its art collection, Fondation Thalie organized an off-site "Créateurs Urgence Climat" event as part of the ArtTalks conference program of the fair. 

Linking art, science and ecology, this conversation between the artist Claudia Comte, a major figure on the Swiss and international scene based in the Basel region, and the Spanish curator Mónica Bello, Head of the Arts at CERN programme – the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva – is an invitation to explore biomorphic universes and symbiotic forms, techno-scientific knowledge and cosmic phenomena.

Claudia Comte (b. 1983, Grancy) is a Swiss artist based in Basel, Switzerland. Her practice is guided by a longstanding interest in teasing out the history and memory of biomorphic forms through traditional hand processes, industrial and machine technologies. Comte’s site-specific installations bring together monumental wall paintings and sculptures playfully inspired by organic patterns and morphology, paying testament to the intelligence and transformative capacities of the ecological world. Her work has been widely presented, including Solo Houses, Matarranña (2023), Globus Public Art Project in collaboration with Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2023), Casa Wabi, Mexico 2023, König Galerie im KHK Wien (2022), Belgrade Biennale (2021), Museo Nacional Thyssen- Bornemisza, Madrid (2021), Castello di Rivoli, Rome (2019), among others.

Mónica Bello is art Historian and Curator. Since 2015, she is Head of Arts at CERN at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, where she leads and supervises the laboratory’s art strategy and the artistic programs (residencies, art commissions, exhibitions). Curator of Exploring the Unknown, the inaugural art exhibition for the CERN Science Gateway, the new visitor centre of the Laboratory designed by Renzo Piano, her most recent curated exhibition is Dark Matters for the Science Gallery Melbourne, and the Icelandic Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale with the artist Sigurður Guðjónsson. Bello works internationally participating in selection committees, advisory boards, and mentorship programs. She is a regular speaker at conferences and active in several programmes in Europe and globally, where art and cultural innovation are the focus. 

This conversation has been organized in partnership with Art Genève.

Created in 2020 by Fondation Thalie, the "Créateurs Urgence Climat" programme of conversations invites artists, designers, thinkers and scientists to the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris each month to share new knowledge in the light of the climate transition and to think about reasoned artistic production in the era of a post-carbon society. Further info online.

For the 4th season of “Créateurs Urgence Climat” (October 2023 – May 2024) in partnership with the École des Arts Décoratifs Paris, Fondation Thalie invites artist and agroecologist Fernando García-Dory and jurist Xenia Chiaramonte to discuss agroecology and the New Imaginaries of Law.

Created in 2020 by the Fondation Thalie, this series of conversations between artists, designers and scientists committed to a post-carbon society aims to pass on new thinking and knowledge to inspire a whole new generation of creators, to invent imaginaries of transition, and to design and implement new ways of producing in the light of depleting natural resources. The great ecological challenge of our time.

Guests: Fernando García-Dory, artist and agroecologist et Xenia Chiaramonte, jurist
Co-moderated by Chiara Vecchiarelli, curator of the programme, and Patrick Laffont de Lojo, scenography teacher at the École des Arts Décoratifs Paris.

How can we understand a territory from the inside, and thwart the illusion of a technosphere always already separated from nature? How can the human technique of law become compatible with a situated ecological approach?

Agroecologist artist Fernando García-Dory and Gaia jurist Xenia Chiaramonte question our artistic and legal imaginaries at the heart of an evolving world, in order to invite us to rethink at the same time biopower as a capacity to “self-organize according to criteria such as care and affection” – criteria to which rurality offers a concrete field of experimentation – and art and law as two practices called to actively engage in favor of a renewed understanding of the categories which govern our actions.

Guests

Fernando García-Dory is an artist whose work engages specifically with the relationship between culture and nature now, as manifested in multiple contexts, from landscape and the rural, to desires and expectations in relation to identity, through (global) crisis, utopia and the potential for social change. Interested in the harmonic complexity of biological forms and processes, his work addresses connections and cooperation, from microorganisms to social systems, and from traditional art languages drawing to collaborative agroecological projects and actions, and cooperatives. He studied Fine Arts and Rural Sociology, and is now preparing his PhD on Agroecology. He has developed projects and shown his work at Tensta Konsthalle, Van Abbemuseum, Reina Sofia Museum, Documenta 12 and Biennales of Gwangju, Istanbul and Athens.

Xenia Chiaramonte is a researcher working primarily on the potential of legal techniques in the time of Gaia. As a thinker but also as an activist, she interrogates the potential of legal imagination in the service of environmental catastrophes and climate breakdown, standing for a situated and pragmatic approach rather than one based on the logic of the universal. She is an affiliated scholar of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. Interested social struggles and law, she published the book Governing conflict: The Criminalization of the No TAV Movement (Governare il conflitto: La criminalizzazione del movimento No TAV, 2019) on the political trials against activists in the context of one of the most important and longstanding environmental movements in Europe. She is also experimenting with the genre of science fiction as well—of a special kind that could be thought of “botanical sci-fi” which began with Greetings from the Undergrowth (published on eflux).

Based on a curatorial proposal by Fondation Thalie, this 4th season hosted at the École des Arts Décoratifs is organised by Chiara Vecchiarelli, coordinator of the programme, in co-construction with Patrick Laffont-DeLojo, teacher in stage design at the École des Arts Décoratifs.

In partnership with the École des Arts Décoratifs de Paris