Phœbe Hadjimarkos Clarke © Apolline Lamoril.
Phœbe Hadjimarkos Clarke © Apolline Lamoril.
Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris - Site Cuvier,
1 rue Jussieu, 75005 Paris
Amphithéâtre, ground floor
Talk with Phoebe Hadjimarkos Clarke, hosted by Pauline Mabit and Matisse Crespo, as part of the author’s residency in Art & Science at Université Paris Cité.
Free admission.
For the Writer’s Residency for Research-Creation in Art & Science “The Thick Present” at Paris Cité University in collaboration with the Centre des politiques de la Terre and the Culture Department of the Paris Cité University, Phœbe Hadjimarkos Clarke will undertake a writing project on fires. The starting point for this exploration is the author’s grandmother, Clara, a fire lookout in the American West during the 1940s and 1950s. The projected text will feature several investigations whose tentacles intertwine in times as thick as pitch: an attempt to reconstruct Clara’s mountaintop experience and place it in her biography; a field survey in the forests of Oregon; a scientific investigation on understanding the dynamics of forest fires today; the discovery of a secret pyromaniac community living a utopian, happy and radical fire.
Phœbe Hadjimarkos Clarke
Phœbe Hadjimarkos Clarke (born in 1987) is a French-American writer and translator. Her novels explore the relationships between humans, non-humans, the environment, and late capitalism. Her first novel, Tabor (Éditions du Sabot, 2021) combined queer anticipation and magical dystopia: Mona and Pauli have survived strange, massive, floods, and live together in Tabor, a rustic and ramshackle new world. In her second novel, Aliène (Éditions du Sous-sol, 2024, and France Inter Book Award winner), she once again questions our political futures. Fauvel, a thirty-something wounded by a rubber bullet during a protest, moves to a small, remote French village to dog-sit a friend’s father’s cloned mutt. In an uncanny, gothic atmosphere, the novel explores anxiety, fear, power relations and the alienating forces of our world. Phœbe Hadjimarkos Clarke also writes poetry (most recently 18 Brum’Hair, Rotolux Press, 2023, co-written with Martin Desinde) and is a translator specialising in the humanities.
The Culture Department of the Paris Cité University, the Centre des Politiques de la Terre
