Towards an International of Rivers and Other Elements of Nature

The multi-year scientific art project by The Institute for Advanced Study of Nantes (L’Institut d’études avancées de Nantes), Towards an international of rivers and other elements of nature ('Vers une Internationale des Rivières et Autres Éléments de la Nature') is a multi-year project, which we have been part of since the beginning.

This three-year project (2023-2026) is conceived as a collective and evolving narrative that questions the extension of nature's rights and the legal personhood of ecosystems through public hearings and interdisciplinary reflections. At the heart of the initiative is the question of 'laws to come': how can we collectively formulate, discuss, and test legal proposals capable of recognising natural entities? Through experimental workshops, the project invites participants to engage in co-creating and testing these future laws - texts imagined to transform the place of natural entities in our legal systems.

The story behind the project:

The approach behind the project 'Towards an International of Rivers...' draws on the transformative power of narratives studied by Camille de Toledo, particularly in his latest book, A History of Vertigo, focusing on what he calls 'fictional dwellings': potential institutions, narratives of metamorphosis, and frameworks for ecological justice. This approach is supported by numerous researchers, including Philippe Descola and Marie-Angèle Hermitte.

It seeks to amplify a global movement in which human communities are gradually recognising the rights of nature and granting legal personhood to their living environments, landscapes, and natural attachments. The project is also a collective, processual endeavour to design a future world populated by non-human legal entities and to transform the circulation of value - diverting surplus value to give more power and autonomy to the entities of nature, instituting a counter-power favourable to life, to long time, and to future generations. (machine translated from French)

Our map of the Loire watershed has been a key part of the project's communication materials, and was used as the cover art for Camille de Toledo's book Le fleuve qui voulait écrire: Les auditions du Parlement de Loire.

Read more about this exciting project on their website.

We are proud to have been involved, and hope for many more years of collaboration with these amazing, determined and creative people.

Images credit: Vers une internationale des rivières... / Camille Toledo