Human beings' relationships with the living world are, in general, conditioned by a logic of instrumentalization and servitude. Western thought in the Cartesian tradition, which has it that human beings are the "lords and masters of nature," presupposes that the modern human being is ontologically distinct from and superior to other living creatures. Today, as biodiversity is increasingly threatened due to capitalist and purely anthropocentric overexploitation of natural resources, this colonialist and predatory vision held by human beings, cut off from their ecosystem, is in greater and greater jeopardy, even though it is still concretely dominant. In recent decades, the human and social sciences, for example, have broadened their field of interest to "animal studies" and human exceptionalism. The spheres of art, history, and art theory are far from immune to this new wave of thought. In fact, numerous artists, opposed to a strictly reifying use of animals as exemplified by Damien Hirst, are engaged in critical and ethical challenges to and rethinking of human interactions with and views of other forms of life, both human and non-human

At a time when biotechnologies (often exploitative) are dissolving the key division between nature and culture on which the modern episteme is founded, it is useful to probe, beyond the dichotomy between human and animal, the current issues with regard to the sphere of the living. In this issue, we therefore focus on art practices that envisage the dynamics of the living in a non-anthropocentric way. How do artists become engaged in this path? How do they explore the value of all forms of life? How do they envisage trans-species relationships? How do they question issues linked to speciesism, or to racism and sexism? These issues, as we know, stem in large part from a normative and phallocentric ideology of humanity in which modern humans are defined in opposition to animality and all those who do not correspond to certain physical criteria (whiteness, maleness) are "thrown into the zoo," as Armelle LeBras-Choppard puts it. Given all of this, how do contemporary artists participate in a recasting of our collective imagination in terms of our perception of multiple forms of life and of difference? How, in fact, do they contest human projections linked to biodeterminism and other forms of essentialism? How do current practices, through their approaches or their aesthetic, political, or ethical strategies, make it possible to envisage a world decolonized of all systems of servitude of the living? Finally, proposals that revisit the idea that art is a highly cultural activity that distinguishes human beings from other living creatures are also deemed worthy of interest.

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