Benjamin Pothier

Dr. Benjamin Pothier is a French anthropologist, artist, and professional explorer whose research challenges foundational assumptions in the discipline.

His interdisciplinary doctoral work — conducted over seven years through the Planetary Collegium at the University of Plymouth under Professor Roy Ascott — produced a formal refutation of Claude Lévi-Strauss's 1944 split representation theory, demonstrating that the chronological framework it relied upon (Karlgren's, overturned by Loehr in 1953) was never corrected in the anthropological literature — assessed by his examiners as "a timely and important corrective to Lévi-Strauss's theory".

His research also includes the first systematic attempt to identify potential entheogenic species depicted in the Chu Silk Manuscript — the oldest known Chinese manuscript, dating to the 4th century BCE — with implications for the role of altered states in early Chinese cosmological thought, published in Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture. He has been described by BBC presenter and former Royal Geographical Society vice president Paul Rose as a "true Renaissance Man."

Dr Pothier joined i-DAT at the University of Plymouth as a Post-Doc Alumni Research Fellow in 2023, his interdisciplinary practice has spanned art, anthropology, space exploration research, and documentary filmmaking. He is a contributor to the Routledge Handbook of Space Policy, a former expert for the Human Spaceflight Committee of the International Astronautical Federation, a former Visiting Scholar and Lecturer at the Human Spaceflight Laboratory, Department of Space Studies, University of North Dakota, and a Fellow International of the Explorers Club (NYC, elected 2018).

In 2022, he became the first French sculptor to send an artwork to the International Space Station — a sculpture infused with Yves Klein's IKB Blue, launched as part of the ISS Moon Gallery. In 2018, he directed a 360° VR expedition film with US and Japanese astronaut candidates on the world's highest volcano, and transmitted a photograph of NASA's Mars Curiosity test site to the Moon and back via the Dwingeloo radio telescope. In 2019, he tested the RISD/NASA MS-1 Mars analog suit atop an active volcano beneath an Icelandic glacier.

Specialising in life in isolated, confined, and extreme environments, he has conducted fieldwork from the driest desert on Earth to the northernmost human settlement. The first French artist selected for the Arctic Circle Residency (2013) and the Ars Bioarctica residency at Kilpisjärvi Biological Station, Finland (2014), he has taught 360° documentary filmmaking at DeTao Masters Academy in Shanghai and was a visiting scholar at the Centre for Sámi and Indigenous Studies at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø.

Part of his photographic series Analog Astronauts was selected for the 24th DongGang International Photo Festival in Yeongwol, South Korea (2026), chosen from entries representing 76 countries.

His work has been featured on PBS, Amazon Prime, ARTE TV, GEO, La Stampa, The Telegraph, Le Figaro, Libération, and others.