Emanuele Coccia
Guest at Moviment
Emanuele Coccia is a philosopher and lecturer at EHESS.
He has been a visiting professor at the universities of Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Düsseldorf, Columbia and Harvard.
He is the author of La Vie sensible, The Life of Plants, Métamorphoses and Philosophie de la maison.
He recently participated in the making of animated videos, such as Quercus (2020, with Formafantasma), Heaven in Matter (2021, with Faye Formisano) and The Portal of Mysteries (2022, with Dotdotdot).
In 2019 he took part in the "Trees" exhibition held at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris.
He edited the catalogue for the 23rd Triennale di Milano, Unknown Unknowns: An Introduction to Mysteries.
He is currently working alongside Alessandro Michele, Creative Director of Gucci, on a publication which explores the relationships between fashion and philosophy.
Platform for New Assemblies
Architecture, Philosophy Meetings
The world today is changing in a way that is threatening traditional forms of coming together and prompting a search for new ways of living together. The climate emergency, crisis in democracy and digitalisation are all challenges that are opening us up to the need and desire to invent new forms of gathering.
The international and multidisciplinary programme Platform for New Assemblies brings together key figures from various disciplines – art, science, cookery and architecture – to discuss various configurations of the collective and examine the way in which we do, and will, live together. They will do so in a variety of forms: spoken word, concerts, performances, screenings, a "meta-siesta", listening session and exhibition of works.
This first edition of the programme, which will be developed over several years with the generous support and collaboration of the CHANEL Culture Fund, will lead us in our reflection from the privacy of the bedroom to the plural density of the city via the informal space of the home.
This first session, which was devised by a think tank comprising the Cave Bureau architecture firm (headed by Stella Mutegi and Kabage Karanja), the philosopher Emanuele Coccia and architect Andrés Jaque, welcomes many voices to the debate: the architectural historian Beatriz Colomina, starred chef Julien Dumas, sociologist Eva Illouz, architect Tatiana Bilbao and many others, all of whom share the conviction that assembly today is an emerging and crucial form.
© Photo : Iwan Baan
© Marie-Pierre Morel
© Photo : Rodrigo Chapa
Courtesy de l’artiste et TEMPLON, Paris – Bruxelles – New York. Photo © Isabelle Arthuis
Photo © Lina Ghotmeh - Architecture. Courtesy : Serpentine
© Photo : Miguel de Guzmán
© Photo : Paul Munene
© Photo Cave Bureau
Assembly 1: What intimacy is there today?
With Cave Bureau (Stella Mutegi et Kabage Karanja), Emanuele Coccia, Andrés Jaque and Aric Chen, director of Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam / moderated by Jean-Max Colard
Assembly 2: What sort of architecture will we live in?
With Beatriz Colomina, architectural historian and director of Princeton University’s Media and Modernity programme; Lina Ghotmeh, French-Lebanese architect and creator of the 2023 pavilion at London’s Serpentine Gallery; and Philippe Rahm, architect and author of the recently published manifesto Style anthropocène (HEAD Geneva).
Assembly 3: Cooking the world
With Julien Dumas, starred chef; Catherine Clarisse, architect, research professor and author of Cuisine, recettes d'architecture; and Emanuele Coccia / moderated by Jean-Max Colard
Assembly 4: How to make a world
With Prem Krishnamurthy, designer, author, educator and director of Wkshps; Joy Mboya, executive director of the GoDown Arts Centre in Nairobi; Tatiana Bilbao, architect; and Beatrice Galilee, co-founder and executive director of The World Around
Assembly 5: The assemblies of tomorrow
With Cave Bureau, Emanuele Coccia, Andrés Jaque and Aric Chen / moderated by Jean-Max Colard
Meetings – Thursday, 11 to Sunday, 14 May 2023
In French and English, with simultaneous interpreting
At the origin of assembly
« The word assembly evokes images of closed places where an indefinite number of human beings come together to make decisions about their future. These are special communities which have enormous power over our lives, but they are also subject to Byzantine rules: behaviour is often reduced to speech. Gestures are greatly reduced, emotions give way to arguments and reason.
But the assemblies that make our life possible are not only in parliaments, party meetings or condominiums. There are more secret forms and spaces, much closer to us, in which we construct the forms of our common life each day. There is no need to leave our homes or beds to start assembling things and people, to bring together friendships and loves, to compose worlds we can live in. In bedroom or kitchen, we constantly assemble human beings and animals, flavours, events, objects, not only to survive, but also to live better.
Domestic spaces are the first, most original and most powerful forms of assemblies that we shape and that shape us. They are more hidden, also less codified, more varied in their vernacular, more heterogeneous and much more open than those in the halls of power. Above all, their aim is to produce pleasure and happiness, in an immediate and immediately shared manner.
This first cycle of meetings around the theme of the assembly attempts to circumscribe the catalogue of all the forms of love, friendships, alliances that allow us to live on this planet. It is also a first exploration of the new forms that the home, the oldest of our assemblies, will have to take in the face of the great climatic changes we are going through. »
