Emanuele Coccia

Emanuele Coccia is Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He has been a visiting professor and researcher at numerous international institutions, including universities in Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Düsseldorf, Columbia University, Harvard, and New York University. His work bridges philosophy, ecology, contemporary art, architecture, and visual theory, proposing a renewed understanding of life, form, and habitation on a planetary scale.

He is the author of several books translated into many languages, including The Life of Plants (Polity, 2018; Rivages, 2016), Metamorphoses (Polity, 2021; Rivages, 2020), and Philosophy of the Home (Penguin, 2023; Rivages, 2021), in which he develops an ecological and philosophical reflection on domestic space and the shared life of humans and non-humans. Together with photographer Viviane Sassen, he published Modern Alchemy (JBE Books, 2022), a book on photographic theory and image-thinking; with Paolo Roversi, Lettres sur la lumière (Gallimard, 2024), a philosophical epistolary on light as a principle of visibility and creation; and with Alessandro Michele, creative director of Valentino, The Life of Forms. Philosophy of Re-enchantment (HarperCollins, 2024), exploring the relationship between philosophy, and fashion. His forthcoming book, New Natures. Planetary Museums (Park Books, 2026), co-authored with author and curator Béatrice Grenier and architect Jeanne Gang, examines the emergence of planetary museums as living ecologies at the intersection of nature, architecture, and culture.

Coccia’s work often extends into architecture, urbanism, and landscape theory. In 2025, he collaborated with architect François Roche on the installation Traité de l’Impermanence (Impermanences Tractatus) for the Venice Architecture Biennale — a reflection on impermanence and the living dynamics of built environments. He has co-directed poetic animation and video essays such as Quercus (2020, with Formafantasma) and The Portal of Mysteries (2022, with Dotdotdot), which explore the agency of matter and the ecology of architectural forms. He edited the catalogs of the 23rd Milan Triennale of Architecture and Design: Unknown Unknowns. An Introduction to Mysteries. 

He has contributed to and curated numerous exhibitions that explore the interrelations between art, fashion, and ecology. In 2019 and 2021, he contributed to Nous les Arbres, presented at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris and the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, where he is also a member of the Academic Committee. Together with Olivier Saillard, he curated The Many Lives of a Garment (ITS Arcademy, Trieste 2024) and Borderless (ITS Arcademy, Trieste, 2025), two exhibitions reflecting on the philosophical and social metamorphoses of fashion. With Yuko Hasegawa, he co-curated Dancing with All at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, centered on ecology, coexistence, and the poetics of movement.

In 2024, Coccia was awarded the Mondriaan Prize for his theoretical and curatorial work bridging philosophy, art, and architecture. His recent research conceives architecture and landscape as living forms — systems of coexistence and imagination through which the world continually reinvents itself.