A lecture held at the Université Permanente on 25 March 2026 provided an opportunity for Verónica Calvo Valenzuela, current fellow of the Chair Living within planetary boundaries, to shed light on the key questions and challenges that structure her research, while sharing her distinctive approach to thinking about habitability.
She retraces the origins and development of her work, from the Bolivian Andes to Nantes, through an interdisciplinary and intercultural perspective at the crossroads of biogeochemistry, geography and socio-anthropology. The lecture offers deeper insight into her initial fieldwork, the theoretical frameworks that underpin her thinking, and her current practice of the “Where to land?” workshops.
The lecture is now available online, both as a full audio recording on the Institute’s SoundCloud (in French) and on YouTube (always in French) as an audio version accompanied by selected images from the presentation. This article also highlights three key moments from the lecture, selected from the full recording.
Critical Zone and Habitability
Verónica situates her work within the field of the Critical Zone, a system extending from bedrock to the lower atmosphere, at the intersection of hydrology, ecology and biogeochemistry. She traces the development of this field, from the first observatories in the United States to the French OZCAR network, and highlights the coexistence of highly contrasting timescales, between the slow processes of soil formation and much faster dynamics.
She also emphasizes that this zone is now disrupted by human activities, leading to imbalances in chemical cycles and raising questions about habitability on a planetary scale. Her analysis is grounded in the Amazon, a region that is both vast and culturally diverse, and draws on references such as a Science journal editorial calling for the “indigenization” of conservation, as well as Ailton Krenak’s work Futuro Ancestral, which invites us to imagine futures rooted in the legacies of the past.
Tarabuco as a Field of Research
Verónica presents her fieldwork in Tarabuco, in the Andes, a territory shaped by the coexistence of several groups and by an attempt at political autonomy launched in 2010. Despite a favorable referendum, the project ultimately failed due to internal disagreements over how to define themselves collectively.
In response, she adopts a different approach, based on photography and dialogue, allowing inhabitants to describe themselves in their own terms. This method reveals a worldview grounded in reciprocity between humans and non-humans, and leads her to rethink habitability—not as occupying a territory, but as being part of it—thus questioning human responsibilities in the Anthropocene.
Structure of the “Where to Land?” Project and Workshops
Verónica then draws a connection with Europe, building on the work of Bruno Latour, particularly Facing Gaia and Where to Land?. She sees in these works a way of bringing the Earth into politics and rethinking our relationship to territories, notably through writing and the description of our attachments. In this context, she has developed a research-action project based on exercises of description and discernment. The idea is that better identifying what we are attached to allows us both to defend certain elements and to let go of others.
Through these practices, she seeks to highlight the relationships between humans and non-humans, to find points of anchorage in Europe for practices observed in the Andes, to foster dialogue between different dimensions of habitability, and to imagine a form of habitability that is both intercultural and interdisciplinary.
