In the bodiless non-places of accelerated capitalist life, in the anxiety of the Covid present, in the toxic sites of the so-called Anthropocene, what does it mean today to get a taste for landscape? Why should one care, and how might the refined ‘palate’, implicit in conservative notion of taste, be reconfigured differently, opened up to democracy and dissensus? We approach these generic questions via a specific route: namely, by interrogating the performative potential – the theatricality, no less – of reenactment, a mode of artistic intervention that since Rebecca Schneider’s pioneering study Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (2011) has been a common trope within theatre and performance studies as well as art history and visual culture in general. But perhaps now – for the reasons intimated above – it is time to rethink and reapply the idea of reenactment, to come terms, somewhat ironically, with its afterlives and possibilities.
In this study day we look to interrogate the relationship between reenactment and landscape precisely because the very idea of landscape was always already bound up with repetition and re-doing: the attempt, that is, by landscape gardeners in the eighteenth century to transpose images from paintings into the very material of the landscape itself; to create aestheticised, tasteful ways of seeing and being. In this study day, landscape is no longer conceived as a primarily visual practice or disposition; rather, it is approached as verb, both active and passive, something that one does as a body, as a skin, a choreography, a performance, a type of theatre. Equally, taste is not a set of rules or protocols that one can apply or discover, as if in some manual; it is a sensate experience, an open-ended, always corporeal event, something that fills the perceiver with enthusiasm and affect. To get a taste for landscape, in other words, is to get a taste for life, which, in keeping with the uncanny, troubling logic of reenactment is also to pay attention to ghosts, spectres and phantoms, to make kin with the living dead – all those that refuse to depart the stage (mise-en-scène).
This study day will be of interest to academic and practice-based researchers in art, theatre, performance, ethnography, geography, archaeology, history, politics, philosophy and literature.
Journée on and off-line organisée dans le cadre du projet RePiT (Labex Les Passés dans le Présent) par Baptiste Buob (Lesc), Nathalie Cau (HAR), Carl Lavery (Glasgow University, Ecology, Environment and Heritage Hub) et Christophe Triau (HAR).
[Salle L205, bâtiment Ricœur, Nanterre / Lien de l'appel vidéo : https://meet.google.com/adz-crgx-ibn]
Programme
9h30 Accueil café
10h00 Carl Lavery : « Reenacting Landscapes »
10h30 Lee Hassall : « Reenactment : Transmatic Reanimation »
11h15 Clare Finburgh-Delijani : « Spectral Seascapes : performer les fantômes postcoloniaux en France »
11h45 Alexandre Koutchevsky : « Théâtre-paysage », dialogue avec Christophe Triau
12h30 – 13h30 : pause déjeuner
13h30 – 15h : Workshop mené par Simon Whitehead
15h15 Sophie Sleigh-Johnson : « Disorientation: Reach for the Ground »
15h45 Emmanuel de Vienne : « Peindre et perdre la culture : l’œuvre d’Amatiwana Trumai »
16h30 Annette Becker : « Les paysages du Rwanda et les reenactments des traumas du génocide des Tutsis »
17h00 Nathalie Cau : « “Dérober au néant noms et figures” : paysages de mémoire, essai filmé (tentative in progress) »