Environmental History III - Symposium & Workshop

For this third edition, LUMA Arles is bringing together researchers, artists and landscape architects to work on a historical approach to ecology.

Environmental history investigates the interactions between humans and the “natural world,” focusing on how non-human entities and multispecies ecologies can transform the understanding of agency in historic and current narratives.

Starting from the premise that industrial societies have profoundly damaged landscapes and ecosystems, Far From the Garden will explore an important question: what can emerge in our damaged landscapes when the increasing impermeability of soil, global-scale urbanism and densification, and vast deforestation are existentially at odds with the idea of a garden as a designed landscape of mediation between nature and culture?

According to landscape architect Bas Smets, who transformed the industrial brownfield of the Parc des Ateliers into a vast public park, in the context of urban history, the development of gardens can be considered as a space that folds in on itself, like a hortus conclusus, a medieval walled garden. This conception of the garden as an enclosed space is in opposition to an exterior landscape that expands beyond strict boundaries.

Today, the idea of a space in extension, rather than fragmented and compartmentalized, allows us to rethink the garden and its role in contemporary society. Drawing upon diverse fields of research, the third edition of Environmental History, Far From the Garden, will explore the various entanglements between nature and culture that shape contemporary narratives and probe the potential of alternative epistemologies to challenge conventional ideas about the garden.

With Mohamed Amer Meziane (Philosopher, Brown University), Hélène Blais (Historian, École normale supérieure), Patrick Boucheron (Historian, Collège de France), Samir Boumediene (Historian, CNRS), Maïa Hawad (Philosopher and independent curator), Tarek El-Ariss (Writer and scholar, Dartmouth College), Natalia Fedorova (Artist and curator), Raphaëlle Guidée (literature Theorist, Université de Poitiers), Maya Lin (environmental Artist), Grégory Quenet (Historian, Université de Versailles), Bas Smets (landscape Architect, Harvard University), Alessandro Stanziani (Historian, EHESS, CNRS), and Zairong Xiang (literature Theorist, Duke Kunshan University).