Earth celebration 2026
🌍🌏🌎
Conference:
Crossed perspectives on ways of inhabiting the Earth
with Eric Julien & Olivier Servais
Wednesday, August 26, 2026, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. at L’Arbre qui Pousse
On Wednesday, August 26, we will welcome Eric Julien, geographer and founder of Tchendukua, and Olivier Servais, historian and anthropologist at UCLouvain, for an evening designed as an entry point into other ways of inhabiting the Earth.
This conference invites us to cross cosmologies that each, in their own way, shed light on the metamorphoses of the world. Eric Julien will carry the voice of the Kogis, an Indigenous people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia. Their worldview is rooted in an intimate relationship with the “living Earth system,” whose balance they seek to preserve through spiritual practices and gestures of care. For more than thirty years, Eric Julien has accompanied their efforts, supporting the recovery of their ancestral lands and the transmission of their knowledge.
Olivier Servais will take us to the First Peoples of Canada, including the Tutchone and Tlingit of the Yukon, whose cosmologies consider other‑than‑humans (animals, spirits, natural entities) as possessing their own agency and social interactions. Through his research at UCLouvain, Olivier Servais studies how their lexicons and symbolisms of cold evolve with global changes, in collaboration with geologist Sophie Opfergelt. More broadly, his work explores how Indigenous symbolisms and practices transform in response to changes in the Earth system.
These visions, from the Sierra Nevada and the Yukon, will be brought into resonance with Western ways of understanding the world. Together, they open an essential question: how can we relearn to inhabit the Earth in a time of crisis? What do these root peoples reveal about our ways of living? How do they perceive global changes—from the intimate to their stories, their words, their daily gestures? And what paths of emancipation can we imagine with them?
This evening also prepares for the arrival of a Kogi delegation on October 11 at L’Arbre qui Pousse, for the closing event of a process of cross‑diagnostics carried out across six sites in Switzerland and France, weaving together ancestral knowledge and modern science.
About the speakers
Eric Julien
Éric Julien is a geographer, mountain guide, consultant, and writer. For more than thirty years, he has been building bridges between Western knowledge and the wisdom of ancestral peoples, particularly the Kogis of Colombia, who saved his life in 1985.
As the founder of the association Tchendukua – Ici et Ailleurs, he works toward the restitution of ancestral lands and the recognition of Indigenous knowledge. His work—supported notably by Edgar Morin—explores complexity, interdependence, and the conditions for a profound cultural transformation.
Olivier Servais
Olivier Servais is a historian and anthropologist. He is a full professor at the University of Louvain in Belgium, where he teaches the anthropology of symbolic systems and their relationships to so‑called “natural” or “artificial” environments. He also teaches at the Institut des Arts de Diffusion (IAD) and at Saint‑Louis University Brussels.
He has conducted fieldwork in Canada, the Philippines, Mauritius, France, Belgium, as well as in digital worlds.
PRACTICAL INFORMATIONS
Address: Chemin du Griffon 1, 1340 Ottignies-Louvain-la-Neuve – Access Map.
Schedule: Wednesday, August 26, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Access:
By bike: you can lock your bicycle on site
By train and on foot: Ottignies station — go up to the footbridge (from the platforms) and follow this route (25 min).
By car: park near the barn or close to the farm on Rue du Corbeau. As parking spaces are limited, and in order to respect nature as much as possible, please prioritise carpooling. Here is a link to help you find people to carpool with..
FEES
Sprout: 20€ (fair price)
Tree: 30€ (supporting price that helps others join)
Seed: 12€ (solidarity price, or AqP member – Limited availability at this rate