Making marks

Feedback from Célia Hoffstetter

What inspired me the most, in the literal and figurative senses, during the summer school – a true breath of fresh air – will have been the understanding that creativity is essential to all research activities.

Having recently entered the academic world (I started this year my doctorate in English linguistics), I initially perceived myself as an apprentice researcher, a language detective. From the beginning of the school year, I went in search of clues, signs; I read tirelessly, always on the lookout for information to interpret, analyse, dissect. More than anything, I strived to find things: traces that might answer my questions and allow me to gradually reconstruct a model. But at the end of the day, seeing my dissertation as an inquiry with drawers or as a huge enigma to solve did not bring me the proverbial "results" that I called for, nor personal satisfaction. At a time of year when fatigue and discouragement (which is often said to be normal during a Ph.D.) seriously dampened my ambition to be the university equivalent of Sherlock Holmes, Arts in the Alps changed my outlook on research. By working for a week with researchers who are also artists (or artists who are also researchers), I understood that traces are not the only things that we find, but truly things that we create, or even undo, sometimes.

There is a poem by Brecht, in his Handbook for City Dwellers, which makes a singular appeal to the reader: "Erase your traces". In light of this short sentence, Arts in the Alps allowed me to define the research process differently. What if the reader were not only the detective searching for scientific truth, but also the bandit who blurs the carefully drawn tracks, escapes ambushes and revels in complexity? The academic world, in short, could well be the domain of the "Fun Lovin’ Criminals", as Jamie sang, while we went in search of lost time at the Lautaret pass…

Like a guided missile, I track, I find, I observe; but even more, I create possibilities, I erase and I start again, I open new paths and close others, I form and transform what I see. Ironically, Arts in the Alps allowed me to appropriate a central concept of my work in linguistics, that of "agency", which I have not only discovered in the semantics of the verbs of my texts, but that I was able to implement in my practices. I passed, so to speak, from the linguistic corpus to the physical body: the morning sessions of physical awakening with Stephanie, the walks around the campus and in the mountains, listening to the sound produced by our movements… all this helped me to reposition myself as the actress of my own musings.

Feedback from Luis Meyer

1. Gestures imprint/borrowed

Questioning the concept of traces allowed me to approach the idea of the imprint as an index, a three-dimensional and fixed way of studying traces. In this sense, I begin to explore the archeology of the wall as a revealing source of the past-present-future of the material of the wall; in my case the brick walls of Lille and Roubaix. The imprint of bricks made from clay becomes for me a center of interest to explore the links between time and space. Moreover, this extracting of traces with a three-dimensional imprint allows me to continue the analysis of architectural-wall-citizen relational issues in the urban space and ask questions about this practice; do traces have a proper ontology? Is the creation of an urban narrative necessary?

2. Ephemeral landscapes

Creating landscapes with brick powder, is an experimental way of exploring the material of the wall by making simple images, vague and ephemeral; each is a way of thinking and imagining the trace of the building that is disappearing. In this case the trace becomes iconic with the use of the monotype.

3. Towards a new understanding of walls

The trace and the sensitive are two important concepts that were discussed during the Spring School. In continuation with these discussions, I have started to take an interest in the traces of collective urban imaginaries contained in texts and stories that I wish to collect through the implementation of an ethnographic inquiry. This will enable me to understand the imaginaries and the traces inhabitants associate with the walls of the town; this undertaking will also allow for a synergie to take place between the creation-inhabitant-artist process and the collective artistic practice.

Feedback from Natalia Amaya García

“June 19, 2019
Grenoble
The Alps

The mountains share their magic with me, with their softness and their colossal presence I can not contain them in my eyes, I love them, I am touched and honored by their presence and their beauty, I owe them respect. I wonder about my mountains, their greenery and my knowledge of them. I say to myself: Geography has allowed me to understand my research.”

During the Spring School, I conducted a small field journal where I tried to record various sensations and reflections generated by different workshops and conferences. The previous paragraph is an excerpt from this journal, and I chose it because I mention two things from this experience that are remarkable for me, geography and mountains.

The meaning that geography gives to the trace as index, allows me, as part of my research, to give value to the smallest of things and to recognize that there is a hidden potential. This potential will allow me to validate another type of knowledge that has been historically underestimated: the knowledge of the sensitive and the knowledge of oneself.

For me, the whole experience of this spring school can be summed up in the mountains as a metaphor for the problematic and the methodology of research.

In the mountain we find various paths, when the path is already made, our point of departure and our point of arrival become clear, we can move safely, but we are only moving through. But when the road is drawn and there is not a lot of traffic, and when it is a dirt road, taking it will require a risk, it is here that the adventure begins. It may take longer, however, this extra time, this detour, will allow us to observe, hear, touch and feel the landscape and find signs that have gone unnoticed before. We discover the traces of others and we can choose to deviate to follow our intuition.

In the mountains, one is never alone, making the path traced collectively can teach us (show, prove) the logic of selection, direction and decision of the other and his knowledge. The researcher must be flexible, must refine his sense of listening, to recognize the contributions of the other who lives in the mountain or around.

The mountain in this amalgam of knowledge is the political place to know better the voices of others (their languages, Turkish, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish).

Knowing the mountain from the inside is doing creative research. Here, the action of doing has a primordial role, in the mountain we sow, we harvest, we investigate, we rest, we know, we create links, we move. To do this, makes us ask questions and find answers generated by sensitivity, here we recognize not only the length of the path but also its width, its possibilities.

I believe that the result of the last collective work based around the time spent in the mountains, where we could interact with them, summarizes the contributions of this experience and the metaphor of the mountain. The mountain is a place where several languages, several fields of knowledge, several researchers and several research communities live, where each has a specificity that the other can learn. To learn about ants and their organization and their work is also to learn about the harvest and the river, it is to learn clouds and their forms, glaciers, flowers, bees; all these elements with their own voice and with something important to say.

We are all in this unstable questioning of creative research, we are all afraid of mud, but we know that the time will come to harvest something.

For all süreç con amor.

If I jump in the “Pyrenees”, will the ground tremble in “Caucasus Mountains”?

If I jump in the “Pyrenees”, will the ground tremble in “Caucasus Mountains”?

If I spend too much time reading the labels, will the other flowers lose their patience?

Were the remarkable plants obliged to apply for a passport?

Are the plants in the water stateless?

Can I hear the same birdsong in the “montagnes australes” as in the “alpes orientales”?

Did the foreign plants have to learn French, and have the gardeners created French as a foreign language programs for the international plants?

When does the sun set in Japan?

What is exotic?

Do I feel more welcome in North America than I do in the Andes and Patagonia?

How many steps do I need to take to get from The Arctic to Corsica?

Do the plants live in an aristocracy? Do they all agree on the political organization?

If the blue thistle regains it’s crown in August, when does the “almost silver geranium” loose its own?

Have any plants managed to escape from the garden?

Does the air taste different in “Corsica”, what about in the “southern Alps”?

Is it snowier in the Arctic than in the Apennines? Do I need an extra layer?

Do the flowers still bloom when it snows? Or do they go on vacation?

Will it take the same amount of time to tour around Japan as it takes to travel around “Central Asia and China”?

Can the same butterfly cross-pollinate between the “Balkan Peninsula” and “Himalaya and Tibet”?

Do the Queens of the garden flirt with each other?

Can two people sing the soundtrack to the sound of music in duet; with one being in the Carpates and the other in the “Massif Central”?

Do all of the plants agree on their pronouns?

The snow of Kilimanjaro has melted. Does this mean that it’s already too late for it’s plants to be represented?