Marc Delalonde

Marc Delalonde is an independent researcher and curator working at the intersection of arts, environmental philosophy and political ecology. He grew up in a small village of Normandy, near a majestic oak tree, in a more-than-human family. He left for the city at 17 and lived in various countries while studying ancient history. He finally set foot in Αthens in 2015 where he completed a master in Classical Cultures and worked as a cultural operator until 2021, when he finally moved to Paris.

Propelled by the ongoing collapse of the biosphere and the lack of political (re)action, he decided to act at the local level and started with studying both Cultural Management (2018, Lyon) and Αthensʼ ecological culture scene. After investigating how Ancient cultures were used to reshape social representations, he decided to research this potential in contemporanean cultures. This led him to curate a cycle of discussions and professional meetings at the French Institute of Greece on “Art & Ecology.”

Feeling a lack of vision for a more-than-human society, he turned to environmental philosophy in order to explore alternative paths able to provoke societal change through storytelling as a way to change the narrative. Major inspirations of his work are Felix Guattariʼs “The Three Ecologies,” Donna Harawayʼs “Staying with the Trouble” and Glenn Albrechtʼs “Earth emotions.” He adopted the latterʼs vision of the Symbiocene —an era of companionship between humans and the rest of the living world— while refusing to use the “Anthropocene” word, a term that invisibilizes the truth.

In 2019, he was selected as a Fellow of the START–Create Cultural Change program and started developing ways to reconnect humans with the Earth through art. Indeed, he believes the lack of such a connection —created by the industrialized petrocapitalist system— is the key to initiating societal change. Together with other young peοple who care for the Earth, he built Generation Symbiocene, a community of young citizens experimenting with artistic tools to cultivate human-nature emotional symbiosis and to tell the story of a renewed human sense of response-ability and care. In his quest to shape natureculture(s) for a more-than-human world, he approaches the crisis as a systemic one, with social oppressions being caused by the same system that pillages natural resources. In his opinion, changing this system therefore requires an intersectional approach, which he wants to focus on in the future.

Marc Delalonde is a participant of The School of Infinite Rehearsals of Οnassis AiR 2020-21 and of the Tailor-made Fellowships program 2022-23.