Saturday
Bruno Latour & Frédérique Aït-Touati
Inside
A conference-performance by Bruno Latour and Frédérique Aït-Touati with Patrick Laffont de Lojo.
Performance in English
Seat reservations at info@bragamediaarts.com
Inside (2016) is the first performance conference of the Earth Trilogyfollowed in 2019 by Moving Earths, then by the third part, Viral. The whole project is a reflection on the need for a profound renewal of our representations of the terrestrial, biotic and abiotic world. Insideexplores visual alternatives to the haunting and deceptive image of the “globe”. The three lecture-performances are the result of a singular process of creation where the philosopher Bruno Latour and the director Frédérique Aït Touati make the stage a place for “stage tests” and philosophical experimentation.
For a long time we thought we were walking on a globe, on the Globe. But in recent years, geochemists have been showing us a completely different planet. They are looking at the “critical zone”, the thin surface film of the Earth where water, soil, subsoil and the living world interact. The critical zone is where life, human activities and resources are concentrated. Can we change the way we see the Earth? Not from a distance, a blue marble lost in the cosmos, but in section. Our way of walking on Earth? No longer on, but with. It is a matter of perception, sensation and modelling. There is nothing like the stage to attempt a thought experiment: to stand not on the Globe, but in this “critical zone” that scientists talk about. To try to understand what it means to “live in it”, we will carry out a series oftests by combining the tools of modelling and simulation -by combining two ways of making ourselves sensitive: through science and through the stage. “Inside” unfolds like a muzzle installation, a guided tour through images of the Earth as a globe. The audience is invited to move literally: to change their view of the Earth’s space, its making, its consistency, its composition, and to test new kinds of representations, more fragile and unstable.

Born in Beaune in 1947, Bruno Latour is a sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher of sciences. His work earned him the highest honor in the social sciences in 2013, the Holberg Prize. Professor at Science Po, he has been interested in the sociology of science and the processes of scientific research (Laboratory Life), in the dynamics of innovations and in the philosophy of the techniques that flow from it (Aramis or the love of techniques), or philosophical anthropology (We have never been modern), calling into question the distinction between nature and society, and to political ecology, Politics of Nature. How do we bring science into a democracy? He was the curator of three major exhibitions: Iconoclash, Making Things Public and Reset Modernity! He taught for a long time in engineering schools, CNAM first, then the Ecole des Mines where he joined the Center of Sociology of Innovation in 1982. Since September 2006, he is a professor at Sciences Po, where he runs Medalab and created the SPEAP program.

As author and theatre director, Frédérique Aït-Touati explores the links between science, literature and politics and is particularly interested in the fictions of science. She has collaborated with Bruno Latour for ten years on theatrical ways to test new hypotheses, especially for questioning the irruption of a controversial new figure, Gaia. As a historian ofscience at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), she has published Fictions of the Cosmos (Chicago, 2011), a study of the links between fiction and modern science. Frédérique teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and directs the SPEAP (Experimental Program in Political Arts), in residence at Nanterre-Amandiers from 2014 to 2021. Her work can be found at zonecrititique.org.