Round tables
Where are the limits of intelligence and the intelligence of limits?
4 December 2025 – from 3:25 PM to 5:00 PM – Grand Kursaal – Moderation by Olivia Recasens
Does intelligence come up against insurmountable barriers, or is it just a perpetual movement of expansion and transcendence? This round table discussion explores the boundaries of knowledge and human, animal, and collective capabilities. Mathematician Cédric Villani explores the limits of understanding in mathematics, that universal language that sometimes stumbles upon the unprovable. Professor Grégory Ninot analyzes the limits of the body, between performance, resilience, and vulnerability. Ethologist Ludovic Dickel reveals how animal intelligence is constantly pushing back the boundaries we have imposed on it. Finally, astrophysicist Alain Riazuelo invites us to go beyond our cognitive abilities to “think the infinite.” Understanding our limits also means learning to overcome, transform, or accept them.
Cédric Villani
Mathematician
Ludovic Dickel
Professor of ethology
Alain Riazuelo
Astrophysicist
Grégory Ninot
Human health researcher
Olivia Recasens
Editorial director
In this age of luxury, has time itself reached its limits?
3 December 2025 – de 16:15 à 17:50 – Grand Kursaal – Modération par Michel Viso
This round table discussion on luxury offers an immersion into the heart of Franche-Comté, a region whose identity has been profoundly shaped by the mastery of time. Here, the measurement of time is not just a tool: it becomes matter, thought, culture, and a driving force for transformation. Anchored in a centuries-old watchmaking heritage, this region has established itself as the capital of time, an incubator for microtechniques and technological expertise capable of creating the infinitely small. Limits, landmarks, and time markers become points of reference for understanding the evolution of a constantly changing biotope in Franche-Comté and Besançon. Around the table, a geographer, a high-frequency entrepreneur, the inventor of silicon micromotors and The Time Changer watch, designers, and luxury artisans will share their perception of time and how it is linked to the world of watchmaking. Together, they will offer a cross-disciplinary reading of the roots, ruptures, and innovations that today fuel technical luxury excellence and the vision of tomorrow.
Philippe Lebru
Founder
Alain Sauter
Artisan geographer
Michel Viso
Scientific advisor
Pierre-François Louvigné
CEO
Emmanuel Girardet
Engineer
Jean-Pierre Viennet
Consultant
What are the limits of heritage conservation?
5 December 2025 – from 10:55 AM to 12:30 PM – Grand Kursaal – Moderation by Michel Viso
France, like every other country, has a rich and diverse heritage that must be preserved for the sake of its people’s history, social cohesion, education, economy, tourism, and research. From decorated caves with a delicate climate threatened by global warming to handwritten and digital archives that are constantly being created, not to mention the works, objects, and specimens in museums and galleries that must be preserved in perpetuity, we are reaching the limits of conservation, ecological limits, and organizational and management limits. So should we preserve everything? This question is one that all heritage institutions (museums, archives, libraries, archaeological services, historic monuments) face, each responding according to its legal framework and professional practices. Archives, which are unique by nature, are subject to a strict selection protocol. Libraries, faced with a mass of printed material, must preserve books published before 1830 but may carry out selective weeding for later works. Archaeology selects the movable archaeological property to be preserved, while museums question their acquisition policy, aware that each new object added to their inventory becomes inalienable. In all areas of heritage, selection is a fundamental act.But beyond the law and customs, other limitations arise: those of saturated spaces, limited financial resources, and overworked teams. Conservation also has an ecological cost. In the face of climate change, the risks of disasters are multiplying, while the measures used to conserve heritage (air conditioning, petroleum-based packaging, transport) weigh heavily on institutions’ carbon footprints. Heritage professionals are therefore faced with a major paradox: preserving the vestiges of the past to pass them on to future generations, but sometimes at the cost of damaging the environment. Using specific examples, particularly from the collections of Besançon’s museums (the Museums of Art and Time, the Natural History Museum, the Museum of Resistance and Deportation, and the Comtois Museum) and municipal libraries and archives, specialists will present the choices made to ensure that future generations can also take care of these shared assets.
Apolline Lefort
Heritage curator and geologist
Pierre Emmanuel Guilleray
Librarian
Christelle Faure
Heritage curator
Julien Cosnuau
Responsible of the archaeology collections
Michel Viso
Exobiologist
Does painting have limits?
4 December 2025 – de 17:05 à 18:40 – Grand Kursaal – Modération par Marie-Laure Desjardins
To question the “limits of painting” is to question a practice that, since its origins, has constantly reinvented itself while coming up against its own obstacles. The limits of the medium and the frame, which impose constraints but also open up possibilities beyond the frame; the limits of representation, where pictorial language oscillates between the illusion of reality and abstraction; the limits of the discipline itself when it frequents and hybridizes with installation, performance, or digital art. Far from heralding the end of painting, these tensions reveal its vitality. Each transgression, hybridization, or attempt at discarding it raises the question of what it can still produce in terms of sensory and critical experience. Faced with the proliferation of immaterial images and innovations in the visual world, the materiality of pigments and gesture, which may appear as resistance or impediments, also constitutes a plural source of creation. Our round table discussion proposes to explore these paradoxes. Painting will be considered not as a vestige, but as a territory with unlimited possibilities.
Marie-Laure Desjardins
Journalist and art critic
Hervé Fischer
Multimedia artist and philosopher
Olivier Kaeppelin
Writer and exhibition curator
