Xavier Wrona is co-creator and director of Après la révolution, an association working to apply architectural thought to objects other than the production of buildings. A lecturer at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Saint-Etienne, he holds a PhD in Architecture, Aesthetics, History and Theory of the Arts from the École Normale Supérieure de Paris, under the supervision of Pierre Caye, entitled: Architecture et savoir, une économie générale du savoir architectural par-delà la production de bâti, de Vitruve à nos jours. He founded the Est-ce ainsi agency (2006-2017), a structure working to refocus architectural practice on its political consequences and its participation in transforming collective life. In 2010, the Est-ce ainsi agency won the French Ministry of Culture’s Albums des Jeunes Architectes et Paysagistes.

On his arrival at Centrale Nantes, Arthur Gosset co-founded Together For Earth, a student association dedicated to the Transition, which today counts almost 50 hubs throughout France. As a witness to the upheaval affecting the Grandes Ecoles, he directed Ruptures, a film voted “Coup de coeur du jury” at the Cannes International Ecological and Social Film Festival when it was released in 2021.

Alexandre Monnin is a teacher-researcher, scientific director of Origens Medialab and director of the MSc “Strategy & Design for the Anthropocene” (ESC Clermont BS x Strate Ecole de Design Lyon). Author of a thesis on the philosophy of the Web, and a former researcher at Inria, he worked for some fifteen years in the digital sector. For the past 7 years, he has been reflecting on the challenges of ecological redirection, a trend he co-initiated with Emmanuel Bonnet and Diego Landivar. He recently co-authored Héritage et Fermeture (with E. Bonnet and D. Landivar, Divergences, 2021), co-edited Ecologie du Smartphone (with Laurence Allard and Nicolas Nova, Le Bord de l’Eau, 2022) and published Politiser le renoncement cette année 2023 (Divergences).

Paul Guillibert is a teacher-researcher in environmental philosophy at the Arcadie center (Anthropocene, Utopia, History) at the University of Namur. He is the author of Terre et capital. Pour un communisme du vivant (Amsterdam).

Jean-Marie Durand is a journalist and author. Head of the “books” section at Philosophie Magazine, former deputy editor-in-chief at Les Inrockuptibles from 1997 to 2018, responsible for the “media”, “debate d’idées” and “art” sections, he was also deputy editor-in-chief of the program C Ce Soir on France 5. He contributes to various media (France Culture, Trois couleurs, Ravages, The Art NewsPaper, La Revue du Crieur, Télérama, Légende…). He has also published several essays: Homo Intellectus, enquête hexagonale sur une espèce en voie de réinvention (La Découverte, 2019); 1977, année électrique (Robert Laffont, 2017); Le cool dans nos veines, histoire d’une sensibilité (Robert Laffont, 2015). In 2021, he will direct the PUF centenary collection.

Ancestral – Luiz Roque (2016, 5 min)

Lightning and thunder rumble the dawn of an ancestral world that is not yet human, unless it is post-human. Nature is no longer this idyllic, undetermined space, but everything that exists before and after life, man, the Anthropocene. Into this atmosphere strides a majestic tamanduá bandeira (great anteater), with the strange rhythm of its gait.  This animal with its distinctive morphology has inspired countless indigenous mythologies and left a deep imprint on the Western imagination.

Langue des oiseaux – Erik Bullot (2021, 54 min)

From the future, a voice tells us how men once strove to describe, transcribe and then imitate birdsong, in the hope perhaps of communicating with them. The human species has often revelled in this music of nature and, in a gesture insensitively mixing admiration and appropriation, has tried to adapt it to the parameters of its world. Two men with similar features investigate the history of these endeavors, gathering documents, interviewing musicians, gleaning demonstrations. Scores of music, some ancient, some original, mimic the acrobatic tunes created by organisms with superhuman abilities. Outstanding voices manage to produce sublime figures, to skim tones of bestial texture or pitch, but the resemblance between the two bloodhounds always remains more obvious than the kinship of these performances with the supple songs of our winged friends. At the end of this journey, it turns out that birdsong remains inimitable, and humans are amicably reminded of the vanity of their will to power, a force that generates so many works of art and yet is the mother of all destruction. (Olivia Cooper-Hadjian, Catalogue Festival Cinéma du réel, 2022)

Phytography – Karel Doing (2020, 8 min)

Phytography is a contact technique invented by Karel Doing in 2016. After immersing plants in a neutral environmental photosensitive solution, it involves placing them in contact with photosensitive film or paper. Phytography delves into the rich and varied world of plant chemistry.

Forest Song – Karel Doing (2022, 4 min)

El nido del sol – Collectif Los ingravidos (2021, 5 min)

In the heart of the sun, Xolotl, Huitzilin and Xochitl meet to rediscover the dance of radiation, whose colorful heat fuels the new fire of their cosmic dance.

The Sun Quartet partie 1 : Sunstone – Collectif Los ingravidos (2017, 8 min)

The Sun Quartet is a solar composition in four movements, a political composition in four natural elements, an audiovisual composition in four metamorphoses of the body: a stone of sunlight where youth blooms in revolt, a river flooding the streets, the burning dawn of the city. And finally, the clamor of the people that shook Mexico City after the night of September 26, 2014. With the sudden disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa students, a breach was opened in Mexico’s body politic.

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (Tehuacán) is a Mexican film collective founded in 2012 to dismantle “commercial and corporate audiovisual grammar and its integrated ideology”. The collective is inspired by the historical avant-gardes and their commitment to using both form and content against alienating realities. The collective creates films around protest and labor, earth and sky, in explosions of sound and image that aim to decolonize ways of seeing the world. Its methods combine digital and analog media, interventions with archival documents, mythology, agitprop, social protest and documentary poetry. His radical experiments with cinematic devices produce images that are both visual and auditory.

Elio Della Noce is a filmmaker and poet, co-author with Lucas Murari of Expanded Nature: Ecologies of experimental cinema (Light Cone, 2022).