Natsuko Uchino & Marc-André Selosse

Natsuko Uchino is an interdisciplinary artist and Professor of sculpture and ceramics at the Ecole Supérieure d’Art et de Design, Le Mans, living between Paris and the South of France. Born in Japan in 1983, she graduated from Cooper Union in New York in 2007 and from the CCA Kitakyushu research programme in Japan in 2012. Uchino’s practice, defined by experiences in agriculture and crafts, relates art to ecology, food and conviviality through the use of ceramics. Her work takes the form of installations, films and performances combining the multiple materialities of sculpture, the functional and the living object. She’s a founding member of the organization Art and Agriculture (NY) and she has exhibited in numerous reknown institutions such as the Elaine -MGK Basel, Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris, Jardin des Plantes, Paris (FIAC-Hors les Murs), Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille. She is represented by Galerie Allen, Paris.

Marc-André Selosse is a professor at the Muséum d’histoire naturelle (Paris) and teaches at several universities in France and abroad. His research focuses on mutual benefit associations (symbiosis), and his teaching on plants, microbes, ecology and evolution. He is an editor of international journals and of Espèces, a popular journal dedicated to natural sciences, and specialises in the links between soil fungi and plant roots. Marc-André Selosse has recently published L’origine du Monde (2021) by Actes Sud, in which he makes a plea for greater respect for the soil.
He is also President of the Fédération BioGée, member of the French Academy of Agriculture. All of his scientific papers can be read online on the Isyeb website.