Emanuele Coccia is a Doctor of philosophy and an Associate Profesor since 2011 at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales. After research in medieval philosophy, his research turns to the theory of the image and the nature of the living. He is the author of La vie des plantes (2017), which received the Prix des rencontres philosophiques de Monaco, and Métamorphoses (2020).
In 2020, Emanuele Coccia defends Kapwani Kiwanga’s art practice as a reporter at the Marcel Duchamp Prize, of which the artist is the winner.

For this panel discussion, the speakers discuss each piece presented in Cima Cima, as well as some of the artist’s previous key artworks. The exhibition is then approached as a journey, a proposed progression towards freedom, a passage of aesthetic re-enchantment from minimal installations towards the irruption of the complexity of life, color and beauty.

Emanuele Coccia and Claire Le Restif also exchange with Kapwani Kiwanga on her relationship to the archive. Indeed, the work of the artist constantly questions the immutable character that is often attributed to archival documents and questions the monolithic status of history. The archive is perhaps then to be understood as an animated, unstable and perishable element being able to be reactivated or to sink in the lapse of memory.

Finally, it is to the place of the living, then to the force of life, that this discussion is interested. This question is at the heart of Cima Cima, notably through the cultivation of rice Oryza glaberrima and with the tomato seeds present in the drawings of Noémie Sauve, which inhabit the exhibition.