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Night of Ideas opens to the East in New Zealand and Japan, and ends in the West in Canada and the United States. The kick-off in France is at the Quai d'Orsay. Antoinette Delafin

An annual event devoted to the free flow of ideas and knowledge, the 4th edition of the Nuit des idées will be held on Thursday, January 31, on the theme "Face to the Present". An international, intergenerational and interdisciplinary night, made of debates including several retransmis online. This "Feast of Thought" coordinated by the French Institute this year benefits for the first time from a partnership with the Fondation de France.

" It's an invitation to all places of culture, libraries, museums, universities, art centers, media, associations to bring this debate of ideas that we need today. An invitation to confront fundamental knowledge with the stakes of the present ", explains RFI Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, coordinator of the 2019 edition at the Institut français. Participatory meetings, forums, round tables, conferences, readings, concerts, screenings, artistic performances are proposed during this evening, with, among other things, collaborative sound creations in Paris and Cairo.

Thanks to the mobilization of the French cultural network abroad, this event takes place simultaneously in 120 cities in France and in 70 countries around the world, from Seoul to Los Angeles, from Abidjan to Helsinki, from Toronto to Astana by way of by Ljubljana, Mexico City, Istanbul, Rennes or Paris, mobilizing nearly a thousand stakeholders around 180 events.

Tyranny of the moment

Night of Ideas opens in the East, New Zealand and Japan, and ends in the West, Canada and the United States. Nights are planned until February 2 in New York, Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Houston, hosted by major partners: Seoul Museum of Modern Art, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation of Lisbon, Pompidou-Kanal Center in Brussels, Tamayo Museum of Mexico, Smithsonian Museum of Washington ...

London, Berlin, Prague, Warsaw ... European capitals are partying. African capitals also: Lome, Dakar, Kinshasa, Addis Ababa, Nouakchott. Decentralized, Night of Ideas is held in 8 cities in Tunisia and Spain, 9 in Colombia, 3 in Belgium and Turkey ... In France, it extends to over 60 locations, half of them in regions.

" What is always very interesting with Nuit des idées," says Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, " is to propose a theme to the world and to see what the world is doing with it. This year, "Facing the Present" leads us to reflect on how to approach " the real, without being fascinated or hypnotized by urgencies that follow one another at an accelerated pace . While one may be tempted by the tyranny of instantaneity, the idea is to find new perspectives, to seek long-term solutions and to summon all the knowledge that can help to take this necessary step back. "

Thinking of the solutions

" Climate change has ceased to be a horizon to become an experience, " continues the coordinator of La Nuit des idées. This is why this 4th edition begins in France at the Quai d'Orsay with a dialogue between Philippe Descola, professor of anthropology at the College de France, guest of honor at the event, and Theaster Gates, American artist and urban planner. The two men will discuss the relationship between the human and the non-human and how to reduce territorial discrimination between one and the other. And deliver avenues to rebuild a social pact to ensure the expression and recognition of diversity on the planet Earth.

Environmental issues are also present in many other debates. In France, at the Palais de la Découverte in Paris and at the Ecole Urbaine de Lyon. In the United States, Washington and Los Angeles ... This 2019 edition will also address the issue of gender equality in Paris and the regions, but also in Prague or Abidjan. Finally, " in a decisive year for the construction of Europe, Europe will be talked about everywhere in Europe. We will really have a kind of direct mapping of the concerns of our world, "adds Mathieu Potte-Bonneville.

The coordinator is pleased with the partnership with the Fondation de France, the largest philanthropic network in France. The goal is "to promote a thought of solutions and commitment ," he concludes . Do not be fooled by the many difficulties and challenges ... Invent, recognize, identify, share the mobilizations, the initiatives that make it possible to face them " .

► Participate in the Nuit des idées of January 31, 2019
► Free and free access to the website of the Institut français
► #lantion of ideas

Heads

The philosopher Barbara Cassin and the historian Patrick Boucheron (in Argentina), the writer Aurélie Filippetti , the philosophers Camille Louis and Geneviève Fraisse and the journalist Aude Lancelin (Belgium), the novelist Miguel Bonnefoy (Spain), the essayist Raphaël Glucksmann (Finland), Laurence Tubiana , President of the European Climate Foundation (in Japan), Spationaut Claudie Haigneré (Bulgaria) and Islamologist Rachid Benzine (Morocco), Cellist Gautier Capuçon and Neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik (Portugal), the philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour (Slovenia), will confront their reflections with figures of international thought as the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , the Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr , the Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz and the Belgian philosopher Chantal Mouffe .

► Listen also to the program De vive (s) voix dedicated to La Nuit des idées , RFI, 30/1/2019

► The official website of the fourth Nuit des idées