Trees

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).

Franco-Russian mathematician Mikhaïl Leonidovitch Gromov, emeritus professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES), has lived in France since 1981. He has received several distinctions, including the Abel Prize in 2009 “for his revolutionary contributions to geometry.” He is known for his work in various areas of geometry, notably Riemannian geometry, geometric group theory, and symplectic topology. In addition to analysis and algebra, he is interested in mathematical contributions to biology.

French botanist and biologist, Francis Hallé is a specialist in tropical rainforest ecology and the architecture of trees. From 1986 to 2003, he directed numerous scientific missions exploring the canopies of tropical forests using the blimp-borne, inflatable “Canopy Raft.” A fervent defender of primary forests, he has published numerous articles and books translated into several languages, and was scientific advisor and co-writer of Luc Jacquet’s film Once Upon A Forest (2013).

Italian biologist, professor at the University of Florence, and member of the Accademia dei Georgofili, Stefano Mancuso studies plant behavior. At the International Laboratory for Plant Neurobiology, which he founded in 2005, he has conducted extensive research on plant sensitivity and on communication in the plant world. He is the author of several scientific books and hundreds of publications in international journals, including Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence (Washington: Island Press, 2013) in collaboration with journalist Alessandra Viola.

Miroslav Radman is a Croatian-French molecular biologist and geneticist. He has made major discoveries relating to the mechanisms of genetic information preservation, including DNA repair mechanisms. He has been a member of the French Académie des Sciences since 2002, and has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Inserm Grand Prize for Biomedical Research in 2003. The work of Miroslav Radman and his collaborators has resulted in over two hundred publications in prestigious international scientific journals, as well as the filing of numerous patents.

Verena Regehr is a Swiss anthropologist. In 1966, after studying education, art, and anthropology in Basel, she moved to the Paraguayan Chaco. Through her NGO, Espacios, she is committed to the realization of indigenous land rights and the recognition of indigenous art in the Chaco. Along with her daughter Ursula, she has organized several exhibitions.

Ursula Regehr is doctoral researcher at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Her research focuses on indigenous modes of representation in the Chaco and their reconfigurations in the context of multiple processes of colonization and nation-building. In the late 1990s, the two women founded the Artes Vivas project: with Osvaldo Pitoe and Jorge Carema, they started the practice, among the artists of the Chaco, of drawing with a ballpoint pen on paper.