Biography
Bolivian and Spanish, Verónica Calvo Valenzuela holds a PhD from Sciences Po Paris. Her dissertation, defended in 2017, examined the role of territory and land in the processes of subjectivation in the Southern Bolivian Andes. After serving as a Temporary Teaching and Research Associate at Université Paris Est Créteil, she joined the Where to Land? workshops in 2019 and embarked on long-term interdisciplinary research on the ecological modes of grounding of human collectives.
Between 2021 and 2024, the workshops were hosted at the Collège des Bernardins within a research chair in environmental humanities. At the end of this period, she began a collaboration with Critical Zone researchers with the aim of developing an anthropological research protocol at the scale of its observatories, notably within HYBAM (Hydrogeochemistry of the Amazon Basin Observatory) in Brazil and Bolivia.
Researcher Profile
Research Project
The Last House: Integrating Anthropology and Earth Sciences to Understand Habitability in the Urban Critical Zone
Verónica Calvo Valenzuela’s research explores the connections between bio-geophysical dynamics and social forms of dwelling. Drawing on Critical Zone sciences—Earth sciences that investigate the thin layer of life located on the planet’s surface—she proposes to enrich this approach through an anthropological reading of collective modes of existence.
Her work is particularly structured around the Where to Land? workshops, which she co-developed at the Collège des Bernardins in dialogue with Bruno Latour. These workshops, which she will also conduct within the framework of the Chair in Nantes, invite local stakeholders (urban planners, architects, developers) to identify their interdependencies—social, affective, economic, and bio-physico-chemical—with the environments they inhabit and transform. By bringing these practices into dialogue with the research carried out at the Nantes Urban Critical Zone Observatory (ONEVU), the project aims to reframe the act of inhabiting within a broader reflection on terrestrial habitability.
Chair Activities
Conferences
Inaugural Lecture: Habitability and Ancestrality: Earth's Time as a Historical Condition
The Chair offers an ambitious and diverse programme designed to share, disseminate, and deepen the knowledge generated through its research and field-based experiments. Opening the residency, the inaugural lecture introduces the Chair’s project as a whole, as well as Verónica Calvo Valenzuela, the invited researcher, presenting the project's aims, key questions, and research perspectives.
Mid-Residency Lecture: Earthly Habitability
Held at the Université Permanente, this lecture provided an opportunity for Verónica Calvo Valenzuela to explore the questions and challenges that shape her research while sharing her distinctive approach to thinking about habitability.
The Chair Dialogues
These two dialogues offer a deeper understanding of how this approach encourages local stakeholders—including urban planners, architects, developers, and public institutions—to identify the social, emotional, economic, and biophysical interdependencies that connect them to the environments they inhabit and transform.
Dialogue #1 took place at the Nantes School of Architecture (ENSA Nantes) on 30 March 2026, bringing together Verónica Calvo Valenzuela and the two speakers from the SHAA workshop, Alexandra Arène and Soheil Hajmirbaba.
Dialogue #2 took place at the Nantes School of Architecture (ENSA Nantes) on 1 June 2026, bringing together Verónica Calvo Valenzuela and biogeochemist Jérôme Gaillardet.
Chair Festival – Second Edition
A concluding event will bring this residency year to a close, bringing together researchers, practitioners, partners, and the wider public to reflect on the insights and perspectives generated through the Chair.
Plus d'information sur cet évènement
Further Reading
News from the Chair
In addition, a range of activities are taking place with the Chair’s partners, within their own territories and specific contexts, as well as in collaboration with other organisations. This collective dynamic will be presented in greater detail soon.
