Alain Elkann Interviews

TASTEMAKER AND HOTELIER. Jasper Conran is a British designer who studied at Parsons School of Art and Design in New York. He has worked on collections of womenswear and for the home, as well as productions for the stage in ballet, opera and theatre. He opened his first hotel in Morocco, L'Hôtel Marrakech, recently followed by Villa Mabrouka in Tangier. "I have a store of ideas in my head, and this ability to switch from one thing to another." "Theatre and ballet let me go crazy." "I went to see the Saint Laurent house and bought it immediately. I could see what it could be as a hotel."

A MISSION TO STOP EXTINCTION. Fanny Minesi is General Director of Friends of Bonobos - Les Amis des Bonobos du Congo (ABC). Her organisation operates the world’s only sanctuary – Lola ya Bonobo - and only rewilding site for bonobos – Ekolo ya Bonobo. Raised in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), she has been immersed in wildlife conservation since childhood. In November 2023 she was presented with the Tusk Award for Conservation in Africa by William, Prince of Wales. Fanny Minesi works to secure the future of endangered bonobos through rescue and rehabilitation, rewilding, conservation law enforcement, education, and economic development. "The only way to survive for bonobos is making a transfer of affection with someone or another bonobo. Love is really important for their survival." "What is different about our organisation is that when small bonobos arrive, we give them a surrogate mother who will give them love and affection." "If we want Congo to value the protection of its natural resources, we

DESIRE FOR FREEDOM. Edward St Aubyn is a British novelist. Five of his books - Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother’s Milk and At Last - form the semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose Novels. In 2018 Benedict Cumberbatch starred in the title role of the five-part drama Patrick Melrose. Edward’s more recent work includes Dunbar - which retells King Lear - and Double Blind, which has been described as 'a book of big ideas, in which the characters experiment with medicine, psychology, narcotics, religion and meditation to understand themselves and find peace. But as cerebral as the book is, it is also deeply felt, because St Aubyn has been thinking about these issues for decades.' “I spoke in every voice except my own.” “I had the double relief of having turned myself into Patrick Melrose, and then Benedict Cumberbatch taking over the burden of being Patrick” “The common driving force of all my work is a desire for freedom”

AT HOME IN TANGIER. Rob Ashford is an American stage director and choreographer. He is a Tony Award, Olivier Award, Emmy Award, Drama Desk Award and Outer Critics Circle Award winner. “The actors come, and they all fall in love with Tangier I promise you that.” “There was blood and mud everywhere, and the audience just really loved it.” “I was very lucky in my career. I am so happy. I could not be happier.”

STRIKINGLY INVENTIVE STORYTELLER. Edward Carey is an English playwright and illustrator who settled in Austin in 2006 and teaches at the University of Texas. His Italian publisher Elisabetta Sgarbi recently made a short film based on his story “Gatto e la casa dei fantasmi” (“The Cat and the House of Ghosts”) which she showed at the 41st Torino Film Festival.

POSTGRADUATE EDUCATION AT A TIME OF TECHNOLOGY AND TENSION. Costis Maglaras is the Dean of Columbia Business School, and the David and Lyn Silfen Professor of Business at Columbia University. He received his BS in Electrical Engineering from Imperial College, London, in 1990, and his MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1991 and 1998, respectively. He joined Columbia Business School in 1998, and prior to becoming dean served as chair of the Decision, Risk & Operations division at the Business School, Director of the School's doctoral program, and was a member of the executive committee of the University's Data Science Institute. He is a Fellow of INFORMS, an Honorary Fellow of the Foreign Policy Association, and a Member of the Economic Club of New York. Quick LinksGet Embed PlayerShare on SocialDownload Audio File  

ART PRECEDES SCIENCE. Santiago Calatrava is a visionary architect, a structural engineer, a sculptor, and a painter based in Switzerland. In his architecture he has merged advanced engineering solutions with dramatic visual statements.

CHRONICLING CAPITALISM. Francine Lacqua is the London-based award-winning anchor of the Bloomberg Television daily weekday programme The Pulse with Francine Lacqua. She also presents Leaders with Lacqua and is a Bloomberg editor-at-large, fluent in English, Italian and French.

ECONOMIC GROWTH AND HUMAN PROGRESS. Dambisa Moyo is a Zambian-born economist and writer whose books, articles, and public lectures centre on the creation of wealth in a global economy.

BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER. Architect Lina Ghotmeh was born and raised in Beirut, where she studied at the American University. In 2005, while working in London and collaborating with Ateliers Jean Nouvel and Foster & Partners, she won an international competition to design the Estonian National Museum. Following this victory, she co-founded her first studio, DGT Architects, in Paris. Upon delivery of this project in 2016, she had established Lina Ghotmeh—Architecture. Ghotmeh has won several prestigious awards, has delivered multiple commended projects and designed the Serpentine Pavilion 2023, À Table.

INSPIRED BY BEES. Stephen Buchmann is a pollination ecologist specializing in bees. He is an Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Entomology and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona and a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London who works towards a world where nature is understood, valued and protected. In his most recent book What a Bee Knows Buchmann explores the thoughts, memories and personalities of bees.

A SENSE OF TIME. Antoine Compagnon is a literary critic, writer, and professor emeritus at the Collège de France, specializing in Marcel Proust. He is Blanche W. Knopf Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. The author of numerous books on literary criticism and history, he was installed as one of the 40 members of the Académie Française known as “the immortals” in May 2023. He was recently appointed the first writer in residence at the musée du Louvre.

CREATING A WEB THAT HOLDS DIFFERENT ELEMENTS TOGETHER. Lee Bul is a contemporary sculpture and installation artist who was born in 1964 to dissident parents under the military dictatorship of Park Chung-Hee in South Korea.  Her work investigates the ways that modern art, architecture and technology have shaped both our real and imagined worlds, and questions patriarchal authority and the marginalization of women.

CONSTRUCTING A SELF THROUGH ART. Jimmy Robert is a visual artist who places the question of the body, racialised, queer, at the centre of his work. Born in 1975 in Guadeloupe, he grew up in France before studying at Goldsmiths College in London and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. He currently lives and works in Berlin, teaching at the UdK, Universität der Künste. His photographs, videos, sculptures, texts and works on paper are usually presented in the form of installations that interweave these various media. He is also known for his performances, with which he questions the visibility of Afro-descendants in art history.

INNOVATION IS THE PATH TO PEACE. Chemi Peres is a Managing Partner and was Co-Founder in 1993 of Pitango, Israel's largest venture capital fund with over $2.8 billion under management. Chemi is also Chairman of the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation, an independent non-profit, non-governmental, and non-political organization founded in 1996 by his father, Nobel Peace Laureate and former President of Israel Shimon Peres. In 2021 Chemi was awarded the prestigious Reinhard Mohn Prize by the Bertelsmann Stiftung in recognition of his outstanding commitment to promoting innovation that serves both business and society.

THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN. Giuliano da Empoli is an Italian and Swiss political essayist, journalist and novelist. The founding chairman of Volta, a think tank based in Milan, he was an advisor to Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi from 2014 to 2016. Now he is a professor at Sciences Po, The Paris Institute of Political Studies. In 2022 da Empoli published in French his debut novel Le mage du Kremlin, for which he received Le Grand Prix du Roman from l'Académie française. 

THE TALENT OF LA NIJINSKA. Lynn Garafola is a dance historian and critic. Professor Emerita of Dance at Barnard College, Columbia University, she is the author of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance. A regular contributor of articles and essays to both scholarly and general interest publications, she is the former editor of the book series "Studies in Dance History," the founder of the Columbia University seminar Studies in Dance, and the curator of exhibitions about the New York City Ballet, Jerome Robbins, and, most recently, the Dance Theatre of Harlem. Her latest book La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern is the first to document the full scope of Bronislava Nijinska's creative work and rewrites the history of Euro-American ballet, beginning with Serge Diaghilev's celebrated Ballets Russes in the early 20th century and continuing until the 1960s.

A MAJOR PHILANTHROPIST. John A. Paulson founded Paulson & Co., an investment management firm based in New York. In 2007 his multi-billion payoff shorting the overheated U.S. housing market made him a global industry superstar. He remains active in the markets.

A VERY SPECIAL MOMENT FOR MILANO. Gianfranco Maraniello is an art historian, contemporary art critic and curator. In May 2022 he was selected to be the Director of the Modern and Contemporary Art Museums in Milano, Italy, which includes Museo del Novecento, GAM Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine, Casa Museo Boschi Di Stefano and Studio Museo Francesco Messina.

REGIONAL SECURITY IN THE MIDDLE EAST. Dr. Sanam Vakil is the Deputy Director of the Middle East North Africa programme at Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London where she leads project work on Iran and Gulf Arab dynamics. Iranian by birth, Dr. Vakil has lived most of her life outside of the Middle East. She obtained a Master's and then a PhD in international relations at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington DC. She then lived in Germany with her husband before moving to London, and she commutes to Bologna twice a month to teach for Johns Hopkins University SAIS Europe.