Damien Hirst, Cherry Blossoms

Damien Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol and grew up in Leeds. In 1984, he moved to London, where he worked in construction before studying for a BA in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths College from 1986 to 1989. In 1988, he conceived and curated a group exhibition of Goldsmiths students, titled Freeze, which marked the beginning of his career through the birth of the Young British Artists movement. Through installation, sculpture, painting, and drawing, he explores the complex relationship between art, life, and death. Internationally renowned, his works have been exhibited in museums and institutions worldwide, notably the Tate Modern in London (2012), as well as the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in Venice (2017).

Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia has been an associate professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris) since 2011. He initially studied agronomy before focusing on philosophy and philology. After receiving his PhD in Florence in 2005, he was a visiting scholar at the universities of Tokyo (2009), Buenos Aires (2010), and Düsseldorf (2013–2014), then Columbia (2015–2016) and Harvard (2022). He is the author of Sensible Life: A Micro-Ontology of the Image (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture and Metamorphoses (Medford: Polity, 2019 and 2021), as well as Philosophie de la maison (Paris: Rivages, 2021).

French art historian, Director of Palais Fesch–Musée des Beaux-Arts, Ajaccio (France).

Philippe Costamagna is a specialist of Italian painting and Florentine Renaissance. He has recently published The Eye (New York: New Vessel Press, 2018), an essay that lifts the veil on the rarified world of connoisseurs devoted to the authentication and discovery of Old Master artworks.

Argentine-Canadian anthologist, essayist, novelist, editor, former Director of the National Library of Argentina and Director of the Center for the Study of the History of Reading (CEHL), Lisbon. Alberto Manguel is the author of numerous non-fiction books such as The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1980), A History of Reading (1996). For over twenty years, he has edited a number of literary anthologies on a variety of themes and genres.

American professor and art historian at Goldsmiths College (Department of Arts), London. She was Editor and Commissioning Editor for Contemporary Art at Phaidon Press (1994-2005, where she commissioned the “Contemporary Artists” monographs, “Themes and Movements” series of anthologies, and other books including Salon to Biennale: Exhibitions that Made Art History (2008).