Station d’écologie forestière de l’Université Paris Cité, Fontainebleau
Research-creation seminar with Phoebe Hadjimarkos Clarke, Pablo Réol, David Posth-Kohler-Kohler, Clara Aubonnet, Guillaume Larregle, and Baptiste Miremont.
As part of Phoebe Hadjimarkos Clarke’s writing residency “The Thick Present”, the seminar “Into the Woods” brings together artists, researchers, and students for a collective exploration of contemporary issues related to forests and fire.
This seminar takes Phoebe Hadjimarkos Clarke’s writing project as its starting point. Through a research process intertwining autobiographical investigation—centered on her grandmother Clara, a firewatch in the American West during the 1940s and 1950s—, scientific inquiry—examining the dynamics, causes, and consequences of today’s wildfires—and fictional exploration—imagining a secret community of pyromaniacs living an utopian, joyous, and radical relationship with fire—the author interrogates fire management practices, gendered relationships with nature, and the impact of fire suppression policies on ecosystems. The forest, as a space of tension between the real and the imaginary, becomes “a narrative that compels us to recognize the world in its tangibility” and “a place (…) conducive to the emergence of fiction.”¹
This immersive and collective research session in the Fontainebleau Massif aims to explore the multiple dimensions of a context and what may—or may not—threaten it, by interweaving landscape, scientific, fictional, and artistic perspectives. Through contributions from artists, scientists, authors, and ecologists, the seminar provides a unique opportunity to combine knowledge and sensibilities, and to rethink our interactions with living systems in a context shaped by environmental crises. Discussions, workshops, field explorations, and presentations will nurture collective reflection on ecological imaginaries, sustainable practices, and how research-creation can shape sensitive and poetic responses to contemporary challenges.
¹See Pierre Schoentjes, Ce qui a lieu. Essai d’écopoétique, Marseille, Wildproject, 2015. Our translation.
Practical Information:
Forest Ecology Station – Université Paris Cité
Route de la Tour Dénecourt, 77 300 Fontainebleau
Station Fontainebleau-Avon (Line R or TER from Paris Gare de Lyon), 10 minutes’ walk from the station.
Program: To be announced
Open to all.
On-site accommodation available, details upon registration.
FREE WITH REGISTRATION
In collaboration with the Centre des Politiques de la Terre and the Culture Department of the Université Paris Cité
