Book by Camille Roulière
Located within the field of environmental humanities, this volume engages with one of the most pr... more Located within the field of environmental humanities, this volume engages with one of the most pressing contemporary environmental challenges of our time: how can we shift our understanding and realign what water means to us? Water is increasingly at the centre of scientific and public debates about climate change. In these debates, rising sea levels compete against desertification; hurricanes and floods follow periods of prolonged drought. As we continue to pollute, canalise and desalinate waters, the ambiguous nature of our relationship with these entities becomes visible. From the paradisiac and pristine scenery of holiday postcards through to the devastated landscapes of post-tsunami news reports, images of waters surround us. And while we continue to damage what most sustains us, collective precarity grows.
Breaking down disciplinary boundaries, with contributions from scholars in the visual arts, history, earth systems, anthropology, architecture, literature and creative writing, archaeology and music, this edited collection creates space for less-prominent perspectives, with many authors coming from female, Indigenous and LGBTQIA+ contexts. Combining established and emerging voices, and practice-led research and critical scholarship, the book explores water across its scientific, symbolic, material, imaginary, practical and aesthetic dimensions. It examines and interrogates our cultural construction and representation of water and, through original research and theory, suggests ways in which we can reframe the dialogue to create a better relationship with water sources in diverse contexts and geographies.
This expansive book brings together key emerging scholarship on water persona and agency and would be an ideal supplementary text for discussions on the blue humanities, climate change, environmental anthropology and environmental history.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Articles by Camille Roulière
Shima, 2022
Since the 1820s, the Murray Mouth (South Australia) has been subjected to such disfiguring abuse ... more Since the 1820s, the Murray Mouth (South Australia) has been subjected to such disfiguring abuse at the hands of colonists that it now faces an unprecedented health crisis. My research consists of implementing a liquid methodology to explore and illuminate this mouth’s d(r)ying waterscapes. To borrow Celan’s phrase, my words represent “attempts to swim on dry land”: they speak of the harsh dialectics of drought and desertification, and yet, water shapes them as they crisscross pages and landscapes. In this essay, I discuss some of those “attempts to swim on dry land”. I illustrate how I articulate and play with the vulnerable interface between (wet) theories and the (dry) realities of the Mouth’s acoustic textures – or, more precisely, how I recorporealise the conceptual in the sensory. We need this recorporealisation because we need to keep trying to swim on dry land. Only through those attempts can we learn how to listen to the wet ontologies hidden behind the colonial veil of blue-green algae blooms, salt and the staccato pounding of the dredgers working hard to keep the Mouth open.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Performance Philosophy, 2021
In this piece, I follow the geo-temporal meanderings of native grasses (in particular yam daisy-M... more In this piece, I follow the geo-temporal meanderings of native grasses (in particular yam daisy-Microseris lanceolate and native millet-Panicum decompositum) through the Australian colonial record and beyond to reveal co-constitutive entanglements which bear witness to a plurality of agri/cultural narratives. In particular, I draw on the concept of trace as theorised by philosophers Jacques Derrida and Édouard Glissant to explore and produce aesthetic interventions which reveal, shape, coerce and/or support these grasses’ presence and agency—their voices. Scattered through geo-temporalities and media, these interventions document—trace—native grasses’ historical experiences and the role(s) awarded to them. Their punctual nature accounts/allows for ruptures, disruptions and (dis)continuity: each intervention carries its own rhythms of the collision between past and future in its midst. This fragmentary state also supports the fluid positioning of voices—the crafting of a textual space where poetics become a tool of decoloniality. Such a juxtaposition of perspectives and representational practices aim to generate intertwining accounts of vegetal being-in-the-world. More precisely, it aims to provide new insights into how native grasses have shaped and been shaped by colonial and decolonial practices—to illuminate their sinuous trajectories with(in) the fabric of the land.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Cordite Scholarly, 2019
http://cordite.org.au/scholarly/chorography-and-toute-eau/
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Winner of the 2017 CHASS (Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences) Australia Prize f... more Winner of the 2017 CHASS (Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences) Australia Prize for a Student.
‘Intertwined Languages and Broken Flows: Reading Ontological Polyphonies in Lower Murray Country (South Australia).’ Unstable States, Mutable Conditions. Spec. issue of Angles: French Perspectives on the Anglophone World 4 (2016).
(http://angles.saesfrance.org/index.php?id=938)
In the context of severe environmental degradation, this article analyses governmental and Ngarrindjeri discourses surrounding the understanding and management of water in Lower Murray Country (South Australia). It shows that mutated colonial practices around water management in the Murray-Darling Basin have placed the Lower Murray region under unprecedented environmental threat. Future-oriented, paternalistic and linguistically intransigent poetics of elsewhere are used to justify the implementation of these monolingual practices, which gag alternative epistemologies. In response to this imperialistic water management (labelled as a second wave of dispossession), and strengthened by the growing recognition of Indigenous rights worldwide, Traditional Owners from the Basin have developed the concept of Cultural Flows to subtly subvert these silencing discourses and reclaim their right to a voice within governmental agencies involved in developing water management policies. This article argues that this reappropriated and re-rooted concept of Cultural Flows is merely the tip of a larger poetic shift in language, and can serve as a pivot around which to understand the mechanisms through which Aboriginal Nations, and in particular the Ngarrindjeri, weave their cultural practices, both figuratively and literally, within mainstream artistic and ecological discourses. Current manifestations of this shift, as expressed through visual arts (Riverland: Yvonne Koolmatrie, Art Gallery of South Australia), music (travelling performance project Ringbalin) and environmental politics (National Cultural Flows Research Project), are examined to demonstrate that this shift creates a new language which can be understood as a mode of highly localised Baroque speech (following Édouard Glissant’s definition of the term).
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
NTROs by Camille Roulière
Wonderground, 2021
Loss tastes metallic. It rolls and oozes from the soil like molten lava. It perforates the air. I... more Loss tastes metallic. It rolls and oozes from the soil like molten lava. It perforates the air. It permeates the waters. Rivers turn saline and then disappear. I walk on their remnant beds and hear loss shriek under the sole of my feet. Loss is corrosive. It is the salt I feel on my lips. It is the blood that drains out of my heart when I hear the news.
I try to contain loss, but it slips and seeps through my fingers like dust that the wind picks up and carries, for thousands of kilometres, until a storm breaks and deposits desert Country sand on city cars. Loss makes life porous. The salt table is rising.
2 January 2020. On BBC Radio, philosopher Tim Morton asks: “what’s the point? If everything is already extinct, what’s the point?” I am listening to him while looking out my office window and the flowering lagerstroemia gently waves at me in the wind. I struggle to reconcile the realities which surround me: species are disappearing at an unprecedented rate and pollinators are loudly buzzing in my garden.
4 April 2021. My grandmother dies after drinking a (last) glass of champagne. And suddenly, worlds collide: I finally understand what Tim Morton meant. He is right, “the end of the world has already happened.” And yet, I am still here. I am still here, along with close to 8 billion other humans. I am still here. And nothing makes sense anymore.
Tim Morton is right: what’s the point?
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Saltbush Review, 2021
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Meanjin, 2021
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Art + Australia 56.2, 2020
There is a space on the horizon where the ocean blurs with the sky. I try not to lose sight of it... more There is a space on the horizon where the ocean blurs with the sky. I try not to lose sight of it as I travel along the mummified coasts of the Nullarbor Plain. Once upon a time (some 3.5 to five million years ago), these plains hosted a lush forest. A rise in ocean temperatures created that ecosystem. Stalagmites and stalactites hidden in the many caves dotting the area carry a distant memory of it. As temperatures get warmer again, a similar forest might once again cover the Nullarbor Plain. At a time where water mismanagement has created a future of dust and blood for Australia, climate change could turn this desert wet.
Gum trees progressively replace saltbushes and scrubs on the limestone bedrock. Rain falls heavily, hiding the traces of the Maralinga and Emu Field nuclear tests. Dust settles as mist. Stars twinkle above and the extensive meteorite deposits preserved by the formerly arid climate start to disappear. They blend within the limestone. The dead, dehydrated horses of the first European explorers float away. Horizons collapse and everything dissolves into particles of rain. Flatness continues.
There is a safe space of humidity, somewhere out there, where the ocean meets the sky. This space makes it possible to read wet ontologies in the red dirt. I close my eyes, dive outside the car, stretch my arms and start moving. Dust coats my skin. I disappear. I don’t walk in the Nullarbor Plain—I swim.
What follows is an attempt at a pataphysics. It speaks of dust drownings, of living in the blurred space at the horizon, of melting in the singularity of the Nullarbor Plain. Or, as poet Paul Celan writes in The Meridian: ‘Please consider even that which will come now, as attempts to swim on dry land.'
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Southerly 77.2, 2017
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Book Chapters by Camille Roulière
Water Lore, 2022
Chapter 5, Water Lore: Practice, Place and Poetics, London: Routledge, 2022.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
‘Murray River Country: Challenging Water Management Practices to (Re)invent Place.’ Perma / Cultu... more ‘Murray River Country: Challenging Water Management Practices to (Re)invent Place.’ Perma / Culture: Imagining Alternatives in an Age of Crisis. Molly Wallace and David Carruthers, eds. London: Routledge, 2017.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Creative Work (Literary) by Camille Roulière
The Saltbush Review, 2021
Poem Excerpt
First published as part of Raining Poetry in Adelaide and subsequently in the first... more Poem Excerpt
First published as part of Raining Poetry in Adelaide and subsequently in the first issue of The Saltbush Review (special feature, 2021 edition of Raining Poetry in Adelaide)
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Le Cafard Hérétique 8 (May 2016): 17-23.
« Maman ne mourra jamais » est une histoire pas aussi ... more Le Cafard Hérétique 8 (May 2016): 17-23.
« Maman ne mourra jamais » est une histoire pas aussi décalée qu'elle n'en donne l'impression au premier abord. C'est l'histoire d'un temps où tout était plus simple, où il existait encore des remèdes magiques à tout problème, quelques dragons au fond de vallées brumeuses et même deux ou trois lutins farfelus tapis sous la grosse commode de l'entrée à côté d'un personnage lego délaissé et d'une pièce de puzzle.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Script-writer (short movie); produced by L'Instant Présent in 2014.
Ce court-métrage tourne aut... more Script-writer (short movie); produced by L'Instant Présent in 2014.
Ce court-métrage tourne autour des personnages de Vincent (Félix Roulière), un jeune garçon qui perd progressivement le sens de la réalité et se coupe du monde qui l'entoure, et Manon (Lucie Ponthieux Bertram), la jeune fille qui le suit sur le chemin d'autodestruction qu'il se trace, explorant la finesse de la ligne séparant illusion et réalité, jouant avec. Sans réaliser. Que cette ligne ne demande qu'à être floutée. Qu'un rien peut la faire s'évaporer.
Complètement.
Pour toujours.
Pouf.
Et qu'une fois cette ligne brisée, il n'est plus question de revenir en arrière. Cela demanderait trop de force. Et Vincent, il est à bout. Il a couru pour un cent mètres et il ne peut pas tenir jusqu'à la fin du marathon. Son coeur, son petit coeur bat dans sa poitrine, mais il ne sait plus comment envoyer le sang au reste de son corps. Il a perdu le chemin. Il s'est perdu en chemin. Et Manon, Manon ne fait pas mieux. Parce qu'à suivre Vincent, son Vincent, son coeur à elle ressemble à un punching ball, à une autoroute. Elle encaisse. Elle survit aux trois tonnes qui lui écrabouillent les poumons et la font suffoquer. Mais elle n'arrive jamais à le rejoindre. Et ils en pleurent tous les deux, mais ça ne change rien.
A travers l'histoire de ces deux personnages, ce court-métrage a pour but d'illustrer la force insidieuse, brutale, complète que l'esprit peut prendre sur les perceptions, et comme il peut se jouer de la réalité et envoyer les gens dans une spirale de désespoir et de solitude, où le monde semble défier les lois de la physique et où les amis n'ont plus leur place et ne peuvent plus venir à leur secours. D'illustrer à quel point la folie place ses victimes hors de portée, et les ballote sauvagement, comme des amarres qui ont perdu leur port, flottant au large, à la dérive.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Selected Keynote and Public Addresses by Camille Roulière
Adelaide Writers' Week, 2022
Reader, Adelaide Writers' Week (7-10 March 2022), The Ruthless Muse Panel
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Lecture, PhD course in Environmental Humanities, Stockholm University (27 September)
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Discovery Series, Friends of the Barr Smith Library, The University of Adelaide, 2020
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Thinking through the Arts Public Lecture Series, 2019
Thinking through the Arts Public Lecture Series, J. M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice & Fab... more Thinking through the Arts Public Lecture Series, J. M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice & Fabrik (23 October 2019).
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
50th Anniversary (Adelaide), Australian Academy of the Humanities, 27 August 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Book by Camille Roulière
Breaking down disciplinary boundaries, with contributions from scholars in the visual arts, history, earth systems, anthropology, architecture, literature and creative writing, archaeology and music, this edited collection creates space for less-prominent perspectives, with many authors coming from female, Indigenous and LGBTQIA+ contexts. Combining established and emerging voices, and practice-led research and critical scholarship, the book explores water across its scientific, symbolic, material, imaginary, practical and aesthetic dimensions. It examines and interrogates our cultural construction and representation of water and, through original research and theory, suggests ways in which we can reframe the dialogue to create a better relationship with water sources in diverse contexts and geographies.
This expansive book brings together key emerging scholarship on water persona and agency and would be an ideal supplementary text for discussions on the blue humanities, climate change, environmental anthropology and environmental history.
Articles by Camille Roulière
‘Intertwined Languages and Broken Flows: Reading Ontological Polyphonies in Lower Murray Country (South Australia).’ Unstable States, Mutable Conditions. Spec. issue of Angles: French Perspectives on the Anglophone World 4 (2016).
(http://angles.saesfrance.org/index.php?id=938)
In the context of severe environmental degradation, this article analyses governmental and Ngarrindjeri discourses surrounding the understanding and management of water in Lower Murray Country (South Australia). It shows that mutated colonial practices around water management in the Murray-Darling Basin have placed the Lower Murray region under unprecedented environmental threat. Future-oriented, paternalistic and linguistically intransigent poetics of elsewhere are used to justify the implementation of these monolingual practices, which gag alternative epistemologies. In response to this imperialistic water management (labelled as a second wave of dispossession), and strengthened by the growing recognition of Indigenous rights worldwide, Traditional Owners from the Basin have developed the concept of Cultural Flows to subtly subvert these silencing discourses and reclaim their right to a voice within governmental agencies involved in developing water management policies. This article argues that this reappropriated and re-rooted concept of Cultural Flows is merely the tip of a larger poetic shift in language, and can serve as a pivot around which to understand the mechanisms through which Aboriginal Nations, and in particular the Ngarrindjeri, weave their cultural practices, both figuratively and literally, within mainstream artistic and ecological discourses. Current manifestations of this shift, as expressed through visual arts (Riverland: Yvonne Koolmatrie, Art Gallery of South Australia), music (travelling performance project Ringbalin) and environmental politics (National Cultural Flows Research Project), are examined to demonstrate that this shift creates a new language which can be understood as a mode of highly localised Baroque speech (following Édouard Glissant’s definition of the term).
NTROs by Camille Roulière
I try to contain loss, but it slips and seeps through my fingers like dust that the wind picks up and carries, for thousands of kilometres, until a storm breaks and deposits desert Country sand on city cars. Loss makes life porous. The salt table is rising.
2 January 2020. On BBC Radio, philosopher Tim Morton asks: “what’s the point? If everything is already extinct, what’s the point?” I am listening to him while looking out my office window and the flowering lagerstroemia gently waves at me in the wind. I struggle to reconcile the realities which surround me: species are disappearing at an unprecedented rate and pollinators are loudly buzzing in my garden.
4 April 2021. My grandmother dies after drinking a (last) glass of champagne. And suddenly, worlds collide: I finally understand what Tim Morton meant. He is right, “the end of the world has already happened.” And yet, I am still here. I am still here, along with close to 8 billion other humans. I am still here. And nothing makes sense anymore.
Tim Morton is right: what’s the point?
Gum trees progressively replace saltbushes and scrubs on the limestone bedrock. Rain falls heavily, hiding the traces of the Maralinga and Emu Field nuclear tests. Dust settles as mist. Stars twinkle above and the extensive meteorite deposits preserved by the formerly arid climate start to disappear. They blend within the limestone. The dead, dehydrated horses of the first European explorers float away. Horizons collapse and everything dissolves into particles of rain. Flatness continues.
There is a safe space of humidity, somewhere out there, where the ocean meets the sky. This space makes it possible to read wet ontologies in the red dirt. I close my eyes, dive outside the car, stretch my arms and start moving. Dust coats my skin. I disappear. I don’t walk in the Nullarbor Plain—I swim.
What follows is an attempt at a pataphysics. It speaks of dust drownings, of living in the blurred space at the horizon, of melting in the singularity of the Nullarbor Plain. Or, as poet Paul Celan writes in The Meridian: ‘Please consider even that which will come now, as attempts to swim on dry land.'
Book Chapters by Camille Roulière
Creative Work (Literary) by Camille Roulière
First published as part of Raining Poetry in Adelaide and subsequently in the first issue of The Saltbush Review (special feature, 2021 edition of Raining Poetry in Adelaide)
« Maman ne mourra jamais » est une histoire pas aussi décalée qu'elle n'en donne l'impression au premier abord. C'est l'histoire d'un temps où tout était plus simple, où il existait encore des remèdes magiques à tout problème, quelques dragons au fond de vallées brumeuses et même deux ou trois lutins farfelus tapis sous la grosse commode de l'entrée à côté d'un personnage lego délaissé et d'une pièce de puzzle.
Ce court-métrage tourne autour des personnages de Vincent (Félix Roulière), un jeune garçon qui perd progressivement le sens de la réalité et se coupe du monde qui l'entoure, et Manon (Lucie Ponthieux Bertram), la jeune fille qui le suit sur le chemin d'autodestruction qu'il se trace, explorant la finesse de la ligne séparant illusion et réalité, jouant avec. Sans réaliser. Que cette ligne ne demande qu'à être floutée. Qu'un rien peut la faire s'évaporer.
Complètement.
Pour toujours.
Pouf.
Et qu'une fois cette ligne brisée, il n'est plus question de revenir en arrière. Cela demanderait trop de force. Et Vincent, il est à bout. Il a couru pour un cent mètres et il ne peut pas tenir jusqu'à la fin du marathon. Son coeur, son petit coeur bat dans sa poitrine, mais il ne sait plus comment envoyer le sang au reste de son corps. Il a perdu le chemin. Il s'est perdu en chemin. Et Manon, Manon ne fait pas mieux. Parce qu'à suivre Vincent, son Vincent, son coeur à elle ressemble à un punching ball, à une autoroute. Elle encaisse. Elle survit aux trois tonnes qui lui écrabouillent les poumons et la font suffoquer. Mais elle n'arrive jamais à le rejoindre. Et ils en pleurent tous les deux, mais ça ne change rien.
A travers l'histoire de ces deux personnages, ce court-métrage a pour but d'illustrer la force insidieuse, brutale, complète que l'esprit peut prendre sur les perceptions, et comme il peut se jouer de la réalité et envoyer les gens dans une spirale de désespoir et de solitude, où le monde semble défier les lois de la physique et où les amis n'ont plus leur place et ne peuvent plus venir à leur secours. D'illustrer à quel point la folie place ses victimes hors de portée, et les ballote sauvagement, comme des amarres qui ont perdu leur port, flottant au large, à la dérive.
Selected Keynote and Public Addresses by Camille Roulière
Breaking down disciplinary boundaries, with contributions from scholars in the visual arts, history, earth systems, anthropology, architecture, literature and creative writing, archaeology and music, this edited collection creates space for less-prominent perspectives, with many authors coming from female, Indigenous and LGBTQIA+ contexts. Combining established and emerging voices, and practice-led research and critical scholarship, the book explores water across its scientific, symbolic, material, imaginary, practical and aesthetic dimensions. It examines and interrogates our cultural construction and representation of water and, through original research and theory, suggests ways in which we can reframe the dialogue to create a better relationship with water sources in diverse contexts and geographies.
This expansive book brings together key emerging scholarship on water persona and agency and would be an ideal supplementary text for discussions on the blue humanities, climate change, environmental anthropology and environmental history.
‘Intertwined Languages and Broken Flows: Reading Ontological Polyphonies in Lower Murray Country (South Australia).’ Unstable States, Mutable Conditions. Spec. issue of Angles: French Perspectives on the Anglophone World 4 (2016).
(http://angles.saesfrance.org/index.php?id=938)
In the context of severe environmental degradation, this article analyses governmental and Ngarrindjeri discourses surrounding the understanding and management of water in Lower Murray Country (South Australia). It shows that mutated colonial practices around water management in the Murray-Darling Basin have placed the Lower Murray region under unprecedented environmental threat. Future-oriented, paternalistic and linguistically intransigent poetics of elsewhere are used to justify the implementation of these monolingual practices, which gag alternative epistemologies. In response to this imperialistic water management (labelled as a second wave of dispossession), and strengthened by the growing recognition of Indigenous rights worldwide, Traditional Owners from the Basin have developed the concept of Cultural Flows to subtly subvert these silencing discourses and reclaim their right to a voice within governmental agencies involved in developing water management policies. This article argues that this reappropriated and re-rooted concept of Cultural Flows is merely the tip of a larger poetic shift in language, and can serve as a pivot around which to understand the mechanisms through which Aboriginal Nations, and in particular the Ngarrindjeri, weave their cultural practices, both figuratively and literally, within mainstream artistic and ecological discourses. Current manifestations of this shift, as expressed through visual arts (Riverland: Yvonne Koolmatrie, Art Gallery of South Australia), music (travelling performance project Ringbalin) and environmental politics (National Cultural Flows Research Project), are examined to demonstrate that this shift creates a new language which can be understood as a mode of highly localised Baroque speech (following Édouard Glissant’s definition of the term).
I try to contain loss, but it slips and seeps through my fingers like dust that the wind picks up and carries, for thousands of kilometres, until a storm breaks and deposits desert Country sand on city cars. Loss makes life porous. The salt table is rising.
2 January 2020. On BBC Radio, philosopher Tim Morton asks: “what’s the point? If everything is already extinct, what’s the point?” I am listening to him while looking out my office window and the flowering lagerstroemia gently waves at me in the wind. I struggle to reconcile the realities which surround me: species are disappearing at an unprecedented rate and pollinators are loudly buzzing in my garden.
4 April 2021. My grandmother dies after drinking a (last) glass of champagne. And suddenly, worlds collide: I finally understand what Tim Morton meant. He is right, “the end of the world has already happened.” And yet, I am still here. I am still here, along with close to 8 billion other humans. I am still here. And nothing makes sense anymore.
Tim Morton is right: what’s the point?
Gum trees progressively replace saltbushes and scrubs on the limestone bedrock. Rain falls heavily, hiding the traces of the Maralinga and Emu Field nuclear tests. Dust settles as mist. Stars twinkle above and the extensive meteorite deposits preserved by the formerly arid climate start to disappear. They blend within the limestone. The dead, dehydrated horses of the first European explorers float away. Horizons collapse and everything dissolves into particles of rain. Flatness continues.
There is a safe space of humidity, somewhere out there, where the ocean meets the sky. This space makes it possible to read wet ontologies in the red dirt. I close my eyes, dive outside the car, stretch my arms and start moving. Dust coats my skin. I disappear. I don’t walk in the Nullarbor Plain—I swim.
What follows is an attempt at a pataphysics. It speaks of dust drownings, of living in the blurred space at the horizon, of melting in the singularity of the Nullarbor Plain. Or, as poet Paul Celan writes in The Meridian: ‘Please consider even that which will come now, as attempts to swim on dry land.'
First published as part of Raining Poetry in Adelaide and subsequently in the first issue of The Saltbush Review (special feature, 2021 edition of Raining Poetry in Adelaide)
« Maman ne mourra jamais » est une histoire pas aussi décalée qu'elle n'en donne l'impression au premier abord. C'est l'histoire d'un temps où tout était plus simple, où il existait encore des remèdes magiques à tout problème, quelques dragons au fond de vallées brumeuses et même deux ou trois lutins farfelus tapis sous la grosse commode de l'entrée à côté d'un personnage lego délaissé et d'une pièce de puzzle.
Ce court-métrage tourne autour des personnages de Vincent (Félix Roulière), un jeune garçon qui perd progressivement le sens de la réalité et se coupe du monde qui l'entoure, et Manon (Lucie Ponthieux Bertram), la jeune fille qui le suit sur le chemin d'autodestruction qu'il se trace, explorant la finesse de la ligne séparant illusion et réalité, jouant avec. Sans réaliser. Que cette ligne ne demande qu'à être floutée. Qu'un rien peut la faire s'évaporer.
Complètement.
Pour toujours.
Pouf.
Et qu'une fois cette ligne brisée, il n'est plus question de revenir en arrière. Cela demanderait trop de force. Et Vincent, il est à bout. Il a couru pour un cent mètres et il ne peut pas tenir jusqu'à la fin du marathon. Son coeur, son petit coeur bat dans sa poitrine, mais il ne sait plus comment envoyer le sang au reste de son corps. Il a perdu le chemin. Il s'est perdu en chemin. Et Manon, Manon ne fait pas mieux. Parce qu'à suivre Vincent, son Vincent, son coeur à elle ressemble à un punching ball, à une autoroute. Elle encaisse. Elle survit aux trois tonnes qui lui écrabouillent les poumons et la font suffoquer. Mais elle n'arrive jamais à le rejoindre. Et ils en pleurent tous les deux, mais ça ne change rien.
A travers l'histoire de ces deux personnages, ce court-métrage a pour but d'illustrer la force insidieuse, brutale, complète que l'esprit peut prendre sur les perceptions, et comme il peut se jouer de la réalité et envoyer les gens dans une spirale de désespoir et de solitude, où le monde semble défier les lois de la physique et où les amis n'ont plus leur place et ne peuvent plus venir à leur secours. D'illustrer à quel point la folie place ses victimes hors de portée, et les ballote sauvagement, comme des amarres qui ont perdu leur port, flottant au large, à la dérive.
Abstract
I grew up watching tadpoles metamorphose in the stream behind my grandmother’s house in the southwest of France. I loved seeing them slowly transform and discover their above-water environment. When I moved to Australia nearly fifteen years ago, I tried to locate where to watch tadpoles. As I repeatedly failed to find any in the watercourses around me, I became aware of the dramatic decline in frog numbers due to human activities, from habitat destruction to pollution and the introduction of highly contagious and lethal diseases. One of these diseases is a microfungal disease called Chytridiomycosis. Over the years, researchers have realised that adding salt to the water could kill the fungal spores without harming the tadpoles and frogs. As ponds and streams turn slightly oceanic due to land mismanagement and abuse that result in rising salinity levels, tadpoles might stand a chance.
Extending Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics to encompass the more-than-human world and drawing on Édouard Glissant’s notion of opacity, this paper follows tadpoles to develop a theoretical framework that rethinks aquatic entanglements. In this space, oceanic and riverine environments collide. And like these waters, stories flow, meet and metamorphose. Such stories draw and highlight shared vulnerabilities and alternative notions of care which reshape salt aesthetics in Australia beyond the confines of sea and rising water table.
Water describes and sounds the South in resonant and manifold ways. This symposium attends to the tones and contours of Southern Waters as they flow across the ‘unique world’ of the ‘blue southern hemisphere’, connecting and infusing the landmasses and islands of the South while circulating through the hydrosphere that distinguishes our planet. It considers the pressure that water – or its absence – places on creative form and on critical thought, and how water gives shape to understandings and performances of place in the world. Located in South Australia and focused particularly on the regions of Australasia and southern/eastern Africa, along with South/Asia, it is interested also in how water offers a medium for thinking between the global South and the geographic South and in what it means to inhabit the driest state of the driest continent on earth.
Featuring readings, performances and screenings of work by acclaimed and emerging writers, choreographers and musicians, the symposium brings creative practitioners and critical thinkers together in a series of conversation panels that reflect on the waters that flood into and infuse Australian literatures, as well as on writing the absence of water in arid states; thinking through wet and dry forms and theories, and across the Indian Ocean; writing rivers in southern lands; immersive and fluid choreographies; and the bejeweling undersea and inland seas of Australia and the ‘oceanic south’.
Cohosted by the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice ('South/South'), the School of Humanities ('Stories from the South') and the Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film at the University of Adelaide; the ARC SRI 'Between Indian and Pacific Oceans: Reframing Australian Literatures'; and the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL)
This conference, will explore the interactions and tensions between local and global spheres of environmental change within our destabilizing world. In the process we hope to encourage new dialogues, collaborations and projects between the different sub-disciplines that make up our burgeoning and evolving fields of study. Individual papers and interdisciplinary panels will address a wide range of themes in the environmental humanities, arts and social sciences.
According to philosopher Édouard Glissant, opacity represents the primacy of plurality over standardising fusion; layers of singularities over reducible transparency. This presentation demonstrates how and why a poetics of opacity can act as a much-needed framework to disrupt representational practices of peoples, places and knowledges in academic writing. Examples of this practical application are drawn from the work of scholar Paul Carter.