Fabrice Hyber, The Valley

French anthropologist Bruce Albert is honorary research director at IRD, the French Research Institute for Development in Marseille, and a fervent defender of the Yanomami people of Brazil, with whom he has been working and visiting since 1975. He is the author of numerous articles and several books on Yanomami ethnography, the situation of indigenous people in the Brazilian Amazon, and the ethics of anthropological research, including The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013) and Yanomami, l’esprit de la forêt (Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2022), both with Davi Kopenawa.

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).

Born in Luçon, in the Vendée department of France, in 1961, Fabrice Hyber is at once an artist, a sower, a researcher, an entrepreneur, and a poet. Investing all modes of expression, he spreads his work from one medium to another, from drawing to painting, from sculpture to video and performance. Through his works, he shows the deployment of a free and lively thought, particularly interested in ecology, the living, the sciences, and the human body. In the 1990s, Hyber returned to the area of his childhood, Vendée, to create the Valley, a space for inspiration and reverie that he has recently opened to artists and the public. In this 100-hectare valley neighboring the family farm, Fabrice Hyber has sowed some 300,000 seeds in just over twenty years, giving rise to a young forest of 100,000 trees. Golden Lion at the 47th Venice Biennale, officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres since 2012, he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 2018, and in 2021, he was appointed ambassador for the ONF-Agir Pour la Forêt, an endowment fund created by the French National Forest Office.

Historian of contemporary art Pascal Rousseau is a specialist in the historical avant-gardes. He has taught at the universities of Lausanne and Geneva, and since 2011 has been a professor of contemporary art history at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He has also been a professor of theoretical education and art history at the Beaux-Arts de Paris since 2019. He is the author of a monograph about Fabrice Hyber published by Hazan (Paris) in 1999. He has also contributed to numerous books about the artist, notably on the occasion of the exhibitions Matières premières (Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2012) and Coup de foudre (Fondation EDF, Paris, 2019).

Olivier Schwartz has been the director of the Virus & Immunity Unit at the Institut Pasteur since 2007. Author of 250 scientific publications, he is a specialist in human pathogenic viruses and their impact on the immune system. His research focuses on the HIV, Chikungunya, Zika, SARS-CoV-2, and Monkeypox viruses. The scientific questions he explores in his work are fundamental, aimed at understanding how viruses work, but also applied, in terms of improving treatment and vaccination strategies. He was Scientific Director of the Institut Pasteur from 2018 to 2019. He has also acted as co-organizer or scientific advisor of various exhibitions combining the arts and sciences, including Pasteur’ Spirit in 2010 and Sans Gêne by Fabrice Hyber in 2012; Organoïde-Pasteur, an artistic-scientific program at the Institut Pasteur; Vaincre le virus by Barthelemy Toguo at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2016; Dans la bibliothèque de Pasteur avec Hervé Di Rosa in 2017, at the Institut Pasteur; and Micromonde: vivre avec les petits êtres, an exhibition at the Musée du Quai Branly in 2022.