LEAP: As an art historian, you contribute to what could be called a “French school of thought” developed by Bruno Latour (you also teach at the School of Political Arts he founded at Sciences Po, SPEAP) around a transdisciplinary approach to the concept of the Anthropocene. You are intellectually aligned with philosophers (Baptiste Morizot), science historians (Frédérique Aït-Touati), anthropologists (Philippe Descola) and even choreographers (Jérôme Bel), and you advocate an approach to art history that draws on other fields of knowledge in order to reconstruct its relationship with the living world. What triggered this break with the classical art history education you received?

Estelle Zhong Mengual: A few years ago, the systemic ecological crisis we are going through changed its place in my life: suddenly, it was no longer a backdrop to my existence, a news item I read about in the newspapers, but a situation whose emotional effects I felt on a daily basis. This is an experience that is undoubtedly shared by many people today. Among all the different aspects of this crisis, it was the biodiversity crisis and the increasing reduction of habitats for wildlife that affected me the most. But I was very troubled by this new emotion, because I realized that I was mourning the disappearance of living beings I didn’t know: I didn’t know how they lived, their history, and sometimes I didn’t even know their names. 

It was because of this strange tension—mourning strangers—that I decided to find a way to bring living beings into my professional practice, into my work as an art historian: I decided that I had to get to know these beings, whose lives clearly mattered to me, without really knowing why. But it was no easy task. Firstly, because nature and art history seem to be two completely separate fields: I couldn’t find a way to connect them.

Then I read Manières d’être vivant (Actes Sud, 2020) by Baptiste Morizot, in which he analyzes the ecological crisis as not only a crisis of our social, economic, and political relationships with living beings, but also as a crisis of our sensitive relationships with living beings. This concept allowed me to envisage a new way of approaching art history, redefined both as research into the forms of sensitivity we have inherited towards living beings and as a possible place for transforming these into richer forms of sensitivity that enable us to perceive, feel and understand the complexity of the living world and our place in it. 

And then, in order to really get to know other animals, plants, and environments, I had to explore other ways of knowing that were not part of my initial training. That’s how I started reading a lot about biology, scientific ecology, environmental history, history of science, and anthropology of nature. The multidisciplinary nature of my work is a central dimension of my research in art history: it is the equipment my eye needs to learn to see living things differently.

LEAP: In Apprendre à voir. Le point de vue du vivant (Actes Sud, 2021), you write an alternative history of art in the form of an “environmental history of art.” You focus on how Western painting has traditionally represented living beings, and consequently on how the contemporary Western gaze has been constructed, silently shaped by the cultural legacy of these representations. How would you characterize the history of the representation of living beings in European painting, and what major periods or lines of development can be identified?

Estelle Zhong Mengual: What struck me very quickly when analyzing Western landscape painting were two distinct phenomena: first, the secondary status and devaluation of the representation of animals, plants, and environments in painting. This is particularly evident in the fact that, until the end of the 18th century, nature often had only the status of a backdrop or setting, even in landscape painting. The meaningful center of the painting remained a human, historical, mythological, or secular scene, which seemed to animate a landscape otherwise represented as inanimate. This secondary status is also reflected in the hierarchy of pictorial genres established by André Félibien in the 17th century, according to which the most highly regarded genres are history painting and portraiture, i.e. genres devoted to the representation of humans and their tribulations, while landscape painting and still life are at the bottom of this hierarchy.

The second phenomenon that struck me greatly is that Western art history has a tendency to interpret animals and plants in painting as conveyors of human meanings: if an eagle or an oak tree is depicted, it is because it can be used as a symbol, a metaphor, or a mirror of human emotions—this is how we are often taught to interpret the presence of living beings in a work of art, as art historian Svetlana Alpers points out. In other words, we only pay attention to living beings on canvas when they speak to us. As if there were any doubt that other forms of life have their own meanings, their own unique and autonomous histories. As if it were extremely difficult to make room for the otherness of these forms of life. An essential part of my work consists of trying to find and analyze Western paintings that have managed to convey the otherness of animals and plants, their capacity to possess indigenous meanings that belong to them, and to translate them for our human eye on canvas.

LEAP: What impact does this story have on the contemporary era, and what are its aesthetic and political consequences?

Estelle Zhong Mengual: The two phenomena I have just described contribute to the devaluation of nature, which, in my view, is characteristic of a certain Western sensibility toward the living world. Of course, everyone loves nature—or at least that is a relatively widely held view—but it is always a less serious, less important subject of attention than human affairs. This relegation of nature to a secondary position in the collective consciousness manifests itself in several ways: an infantilization of interest in animals; an assimilation of interest in nature to sentimentality; a reduction of nature to a place of leisure or relaxation—where we come to find ourselves, which in my view is yet another symptom of this systemic difficulty in being sensitive and open to otherness… The list could go on and on. And of course, the spontaneous tendency we have in the West to perceive the living world as an inanimate backdrop has made it easier for us to consider it perfectly normal to exploit nature as a pure resource that does not require any special consideration – and from this point of view, our aesthetic relationship with the living world is inextricably linked to our political and economic relationship with it.

LEAP: Last year, you created the show Danses non humaines (Non-Human Dances, 2024) with choreographer Jérôme Bel, which explores the relationships that choreographers have created with the living world. You invite us to a complete reinterpretation of the history of modern dance, from L’Entrée du Soleil, performed by Louis XIV himself in 1653, to Pina Bausch. What are the similarities and differences between pictorial representations and performative representations of living beings in the European tradition? This is particularly relevant given that dance has the unique ability to “bring non-human lives into human bodies.”

Estelle Zhong Mengual: Dance reflects certain mechanisms of representation and interpretation of the living world that are also at work in painting: nature, in many choreographic pieces, is invoked as a means of signifying specifically human things, whether political power, as in the dance of Louis XIV, or human emotional states, as in the work of Isadora Duncan. Nevertheless, what fascinated me when I worked with Jérôme Bel was discovering that dance was a privileged place for understanding that being human is not an obstacle to trying to approach and understand other living beings, as I often hear, as if it condemned us to never being able to step outside ourselves. In dance, the human body is the main medium and, at first glance, it seems to be a structural obstacle to making room for non-humans in this art form. But the human body can also become an intense place for the shared experience of our deep kinship with other animals, as can be seen in Xavier Leroy’s piece Low Pieces (2011). For our body is a human animal body: it shares a history of several million years with other animals, with whom we have in common ways of feeling, behaving, and interacting. The human body, and therefore dance, can thus be a vehicle through which we can break free from the Western dualism that constantly opposes humans and other living beings.

LEAP: In Apprendre à voir, you focus on 19th-century women writers and naturalists (mainly English and American), who embody the home-based tradition of naturalist writing: “It is not in distant colonies, it is not among other people that we set out to discover life, but from our own homes, from the hearth: or rather, the hearth itself is revealed as shared by all these other living beings.” You want to rehabilitate this home-based style of attention, which has been overshadowed by the tradition of wilderness, “whose writings take place on the edge of the civilized world, deep in the wild forests, and certainly not under the roof of the home, in the garden, or on the edge of a country lane.” How can the home-based style of attention redefine our relationship with the living world? How are artists putting this into practice today?

Estelle Zhong Mengual: The home-based style of attention encourages us to perceive plants and other animals not as entities that inhabit a nature that is external, distant, and remote from us, but as cohabitants with whom we share the Earth and thus our daily living spaces, even when we live in cities. They lead their own lives at every moment, around us, right next to us. This means that it is possible for each of us, if we so desire, to dedicate some time each day to recognizing their presence and paying attention to how they make the spaces we walk through their own and how they inhabit the times of day we go through—which we often see only from a human perspective. What was important for me in discovering this style of home-based attention was understanding that living beings are always already in our lives—they are not elsewhere, outside, far away, inaccessible—but always at the edge of our gaze, and so the challenge is to transform the paths of our attention. I really like the work Arrivals/Departures (2016) by English artist Marcus Coates: he took over a digital billboard in Utrecht station in the Netherlands, which instead of announcing train departures and arrivals, announces a non-human departure or arrival taking place in the region on that date. “November 8—today, salmon are swimming upstream to spawn”; “June 4—wild roses are beginning to bloom.” It’s a way of opening a window into the very heart of our living spaces, reminding us that space and time are shared with other forms of life, made up of rhythms and events like ours, but unique to them. Everyday life expands, enriches itself, and repopulates itself. In my view, this work embodies the simple yet easily forgotten observation that guides all my work, formulated by the American poet Mary Oliver, who also spent her days observing the living world around her home in Cape Cod: “There is only one world.”