Conference organized as part of the educational program, open to the public. Olivier Remaud is a French philosopher and writer, director of studies at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences.
In most Western cosmogonies, the elements are extracted from an original mixture, and separated so that forms spring forth. The sky flies away, the earth becomes firm, seas spread. Then life manifests itself, the celestial movements make the world harmonious by tuning their dissonances, and humans claim their sovereignty. Today, the Earth is playing a different part. It reacts to what it is made to undergo. Hurricanes and floods, droughts and mega-storms, or earthquakes, each of these events reminds us that nothing is fixed, no soil is stable, and that harmony is an image. We have lived so long with the idea of a well-ordered world that we have relegated the elements to the background of a decor. We have become "aliens" (Italo Calvino). How to find the right agreement in order to adjust the living among themselves and become terrestrial again? With hydro-feminism (Astrida Neimanis), it is time to change narratives, listen to all the voices of nature and understand that we are intimately connected to the world through the life of the elements. To invent other ways of recounting our reciprocities with the non-human at the crossroads of ecology, anthropology and literature, in a constant dialogue with the arts and sciences, we must first reconcile ourselves with meteorological moods, the deep breaths of water, the fluid materials of the Earth, and live immersion experiences.