Nature in contemporary art

The FMSH is pleased to welcome the COST network, and more specifically its CIRCUL'ARTS project, during three consecutive days, for a series of conferences on the theme of nature in contemporary art.

The lectures will enable international researchers to present their work, combining innovation and a return to nature, by addressing the relationship between nature and different forms of art.

• Carina Maria Guimarães Moreira: professor and coordinator of the graduate programme in performing arts at the Federal University of São João del Rei (Minas Gerais, Brazil). She is also a playwright. Her areas of study include popular culture, political theatre and Afro-Brazilian culture, with a particular focus on the links between theatre and class struggle. She created and coordinated the Coletivo Fuzuê, a university theatre troupe.
   
• Carlos Henrique Aurélio dos Santos (Carlos Toindé): researcher, artist and doctoral student studying the Bantu terreiro worldview as a creative approach in the performing arts. He conducts research on ancestry, ritual spaces (terreiro) and theatre production. He is also a member of the Coletivo Fuzuê.
   
• Carlos Alberto Torres: professor emeritus and former director of the UCLA Latin American Centre (School of Education and Information Centre, Los Angeles, United States), world-renowned political sociologist of education, born in Argentina. He is the director and founder of the Paulo Freire Institute in São Paulo (Brazil), with Paulo Freire, in Buenos Aires (Argentina) and at UCLA. He has been invited as a visiting professor at numerous universities in North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa. He was the first holder of the UNESCO-UCLA Chair in Global Learning and Global Citizenship Education in the UCLA Department of Education (2016-2020). Carlos Alberto Torres is the author of more than 62 books.
   
• Françoise Vergès: political theorist, historian, film producer, independent exhibition curator, decolonial feminist activist and public educator. She is currently a senior researcher at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, University College, London. Her works include: Programme de désordre absolu: Décoloniser le musée (Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonising the Museum), La Fabrique éditions, Paris 2023, Une théorie féministe de la violence — Pour une politique antiraciste de la protection (A Feminist Theory of Violence — Towards an Anti-Racist Politics of Protection), La Fabrique éditions, November 2020, Un féminisme décolonial (Decolonial Feminism), La Fabrique éditions, 2019, Le Ventre des femmes : capitalisme, racialisation, féminisme (Women's Belly: Capitalism, Racialisation, Feminism), Éditions Albin Michel, 2017, L'Homme prédateur, ce que nous enseigne l'esclavage sur notre temps (The Predatory Man: What Slavery Teaches Us About Our Times), Éditions Albin Michel, 2011.
   
• Odile Burluraux: Chief Curator of Contemporary Art at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris (MAM), in charge of the video collections and exhibition curator, organising group exhibitions since the 1990s, which have included international artists. In 2019, she organised a retrospective of Hans Hartung with 300 works. In 2021, she curated The Power of My Hets, featuring 16 women artists living on the African continent and in the African diaspora (in collaboration with Suzana Sousa). That same year, the curator was invited to the ASIA NOW Art Fair and presented 10 Iranian women artists exploring migration, identity and female subjectivities. She has edited various monographs and artist catalogues.