Arturo Escobar & matali crasset

Arturo Escobar is a Colombian anthropologist and researcher-activist. Professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina until 2019, he is a founding member of the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality program. Since the 1990s, he has been theorizing about political ecology, proposing a decentered and critical approach to the notion of "Third World", which he believes is specific to a cultural and historical discourse of Western culture. He works closely with several Afro-Colombian environmental and feminist organizations on territorial struggles against extractivism, post-developmentalist and post-capitalist transitions. He is notably the author of Sentir-penser avec la terre: l'écologie au-delà de l'Occident (Seuil, 2018), which breaks with Western universalism in favor of pluriversal thinking.

matali crasset is a French designer of international renown. Since her training at Ateliers-ENSCI in the 1990s, she has championed design at the crossroads of artistic, anthropological and social practice. She works for a design of creation, of the living and the everyday: how can design contribute to living together and accompany us in the contemporary world? It is from this simple yet committed premise that she thinks and works "in motion". For the past 30 years, she has been inventing her own unique path, nourished by the hundreds of projects she has carried out in architecture, scenography, object design, furniture, public spaces and interior design. Her work is exhibited in cultural institutions in France and abroad, and is included in major museum design collections, from New York's Moma to the Centre Pompidou.