Environmental History 5

The fifth edition of the Environmental History symposium examines the entanglements between humans and the natural world, with particular attention to the role of nonhuman actors in historical and contemporary narratives. Under the title Mythological Machines, this edition turns to myth-making as a critical framework for understanding how environmental histories are produced, transmitted, and transformed.

Myth is approached here not as a residue of the past, nor as a fiction opposed to knowledge. It is understood as a dynamic structure through which societies organize relations between bodies, territories, species, technologies, and forms of power. Myths produce orientations, as they shape perceptions, legitimize actions, distribute agency, and define the limits of what can be imagined or contested.

In the context of ecological crisis, environmental history cannot be separated from the narratives through which human and nonhuman worlds are interpreted. The boundaries that once separated nature from culture, human agency from environmental force, and historical process from planetary condition have become increasingly unstable. This instability invites renewed attention to the systems of meaning through which environments are understood, governed, exploited, protected, or reconfigured.

Mythological Machines proposes examining myth-making as an active process rather than a fixed body of inherited stories. It asks how myths are constructed, circulated, adapted, and instrumentalized across different historical and cultural contexts. It also considers how contemporary technological imaginaries, ecological discourses, and political formations generate new narratives about the future of Earth, the status of life, and the agency of human and nonhuman actors.

Rather than offering a comprehensive typology of environmental myths, the symposium focuses on their operativity. How do myths organize collective perception? How do they make certain forms of environmental action possible while limiting others? How do they translate ecological change into cultural, political, or historical meaning? How do they persist, mutate, or lose force under conditions of crisis?

Bringing together researchers, artists, and thinkers, the symposium places myth-making at the center of environmental history. It approaches myth as a material and conceptual force that participates in the formation of worlds, histories, and futures.

Speakers include: Norman Ajari (philosopher), Sabine Barles (urban planner), Déborah Bucchi (author),  Brother Portrait (poet), Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha (artist), Grégory Chatonsky (artist), Alfonse Chiu (author, curator, and designer), Lionel Devlieger (engineer-architect and historian), Jeanne Etelain (philosopher), Vincent Giovannoni (curator), Julien d’Huy (historian and mythologist), Rachel Kay (anthropologist), Corentin Laplanche-Tsutsui (artist and filmmaker), Nastassja Martin (anthropologist), Fredj Moussa (artist and filmmaker), Wilfried N’Sondé (author and musician), Josèfa Ntjam (artist), Christelle Oyiri (artist and DJ), Verena Paravel (artist and filmmaker), Grégory Quenet (historian).