Friday November 22, 2024

9:00-10:45 am: Panel 3: Tales of fieldwork

Suzanne Champoux Williams (Université de Sherbrooke): "Writing the experience: the limitations of words in contemporary exploration story"

This communication will focus on the documenting challenge of extreme expeditions accounts. Like geopoetics, the expedition narrative is a literary practice of hindsight in which the lived experience is at the heart of the writing process or, in the words of Kenneth White, “[it is] a physical experience that extends to the spaces of the mind”. Words convey a venture – the impression of a place or the crossing of a territory – but are necessarily coloured by the temporal and spatial distances that separate them from the event which initiated their writing. Can we keep track of an instant without cutting ourselves off from the present moment? Also, how can we express the territory without giving it our own voice? My goal is to explore these impossibilities and examine the ways in which certain authors approach them in order to reconcile the presence of the self and its subjectivity in nature writing.

My doctorate in research-creation focuses on travel writing as a non-fiction practice and, more specifically, on exploration storytelling. I aim to study – as well as experience – extreme adventure writing and the motivations that entice explorers to undertake intense physical challenges (the “before”), the ways in which they record or share the expedition while it is happening (the “during”), and the lessons that emerge in retrospect in the form of anecdotes or stories (the “after”). My literary corpus is made up of works recounting the surpassing of individual and collective limits through physical exploits, and which express an autonomous crossing (or ascent) of territories. With an interdisciplinary methodology (literary theories, geopoetics and therapeutic creative writing), I will observe the behaviours of athletes tackling their own limits in a challenging environment – on a spectrum between humility and hubris – and the relationship between human being and nature that manifests in such situations (a relationship of equals, of conquerors, of victim, of scientific interest, of contemplation, etc.).

Rosaline Deslauriers (Université Laval, conteuse, musicienne, metteuse en scène) et Camille Deslauriers (Université du Québec à Rimouski): "Le Fjord du Saint-Laurent au prisme de la scène : de l’Expédition Bleue à Passion déchets"

During this communication, we will question the creative processes that allowed the advent of Passion déchets, an interdisciplinary show that was created in August 2024 at the Château Landry (Quebec, Canada), but which was part of the wake of two research-creation stays taking place aboard sailboats, and which brought together, on the stage, 1 musician director, 1 double bass player, 4 authors and 3 scientists. First, Camille Deslauriers will present the Organisation bleue, a non-profit association founded in 2018 by the head of mission and marine biologist Anne-Marie Asselin, as well as the Expéditions Bleues in which she participated as an author, professor of literary creation and co-organizer of the literary component of Expéditions Bleues I (Gulf of St. Lawrence) and II (Saguenay-Saint-Laurent). She will then present the methodological framework of geopoetics and ecopoetics that allowed the writers to resonate, during these missions, their own research-creation with that of their scientific colleagues. How can we create an echo between literary creation and the study of microplastics in the waters of the St. Lawrence and the macroplastics collected and recorded on its banks? How can we represent the threats to the ecosystems of the waterways and maritime banks through writing? She will then discuss three of the literary forms that were favored during these two crossings: poetic postcards and notebook entries, virtually published along the journeys, as well as stories of waste intended to be published, later, in a book written in interdisciplinarity.

In a second part, the multidisciplinary artist Rosaline Deslauriers will present the issues and constraints that presided over the creation of Passion déchets, a show that she instigated and in which texts, musical instruments, voices, waste, tools used during riverbank clean-ups, a screen on which an experimental short film directed by Anne-Marie Asselin (Nos reflets à la mer) was projected shared the stage. Recycling, concrete actions, interaction and complementary oppositions are the notions around which her speech will gravitate, because they served as a common thread in her approach as a director. What stages marked the conception of this hybrid show, swaying between musical theater, theatrical reading and stage writing, from the search for the title to the only performance carried out, to date, during the closing of a creative residency of less than 48 hours? What exchanges of knowledge have allowed scientists and artists to abolish the boundaries between their respective fields, so that all get involved in the "game" and agree to explore areas that, between navigation, literature and theater, were little - or not at all - familiar to them? From the Fjord to the stage, via words, musical ideas, statistics and waste collected on the banks of the Saint-Laurent, Camille and Rosaline Deslauriers will examine the porosity of the boundaries between science, literary creation and the arts, in order to address both the philosophy of creation that underlies this committed show and the new horizons that Passion déchets could open up during subsequent research-creation missions.

Sylvie Lamandé (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès / ED ALLPH@ / UR Lara-Seppia): "Au-delà des frontières entre les arts. Pour une approche po(ï)étique et plastique du monde. Le textile comme vecteur d’une expérience sensible et tangible. Enquête au jardin"