October 2020
SEMINARS
Around warfare
From September 30 to October 3, this seminar, organized by Pierre Morel, will bring together fifteen high-level participants and will focus on the hybrid threats that characterize contemporary conflicts. “Hybrid warfare” combines military and non-military actions, conventional and unconventional means. Theorized in an American article from 2005, it has since spread widely in institutional circles, national doctrines and at NATO, but remains contested in academic circles, which denounce its too great extent and its vague character. To what extent can it help us to understand the new faces of war, but also the difficulties in making and consolidating peace ?
THE VOICE ACADEMY
2019 saw the celebration of the seven half-centuries of our Royal Academy of Music, whose name was first given by Louis XIV to the Paris Opera. Considered as an early cultural exception, the genre instituted in 1669 is more than a particular form of sung theater. It is a complete art, inherited from both the royal ballet and the tragic declamation, in every point distinct from the Italian opera which reigned for a long time throughout Europe. Don’t we owe its masterpieces to the Europeans Lulli, Gluck, Meyerbeer, Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi, Offenbach? It is this delicate but powerful enough art, still alive three and a half centuries after its invention, that the Voice Academy proposes to transmit during a week at Les Treilles. Our guest professor will be the unrivalled Annick Massis.
RESIDENTIAL STUDIES
A sociology of legitimate violence – Cédric Moreau de Bellaing
The expression “legitimate violence” is not easy to sociologically investigate. These works, of constructivist inspiration, refer the political and moral debates on the legitimacy of violence either to scholastic quarrels that must be broken through, or to categories that mobilize the actors to describe the social world. These studies must be undone to elucidate the social configurations which give them authority.
Stories of colour – Charlotte Ribeyrol
Stories of colour is a (book)case study – an essay retracing the history of a forgotten and yet extraordinary object, William Burges’s 3 meter-high bookcase (1859-62) which caused a sensation at the 1862 London International Exhibition. Modelled on a polychrome Gothic armoire from Noyon cathedral, this unique piece of painted furniture which has just returned to the Oxford Ashmolean Museum after an absence of over 80 years, draws on literary sources (Sappho, Ovid, Dante) to illustrate colourful narratives about the pagan and Christian origins of the arts. This book – which will be a major outcome of the ERC programme CHROMOTOPE – will give a new insight into how major Victorian artists and writers related to the scientific culture of their time and how this in turn fuelled their artistic imagination and practice.
Temporary exhibitions – Brigitte Gilardet
This research project, which is at the heart of the media dimension of the history of contemporary societies, describes and puts into perspective the temporary exhibitions and their curators, highlighting the developments that have taken place in this field of activity since 1945. The first part is historical, and it endeavors to retrace the main stages in the history of temporary exhibitions organized in France (or from France) since 1945. The second part brings together the written testimony of around thirty exhibition curators of various professional origins (artists, art critics, museum curators, collectors, academics, patrons, independent exhibition curators) who have played a major role in a particular field of the history of art.
THE AUTHOR’S RESIDENCY PRIZE
Laurence Lacour
She is here to work on her new novel The fabric of heaven. The topic her book is a passionate love correspondence during the civil war between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. This complex conflict, opposing religious and political convictions, with purely British and international issues, serves above all as a backdrop for the expression of the two characters. The story is first of all that of two beings at opposite ends of each other called to become fusional. The novel has neither narrator nor dialogues and is based only on their letters.
Sophie Divry
The initial idea of our recently arrived guest is to make the rover “Curiosity”, the NASA rolling laboratory on the surface of Mars since 2012 – and partly directed from Toulouse – the hero of her novel. A rover that escapes human control, and walks at will in Mars, which greatly disturbs engineers, and that will make the reader smile, because the idea is as much to have fun with the power of fiction, as ‘to reflect on science and the will to rule’.
EXHIBITIONS
From October 10 to November 14, an exhibition of the work of our 12 female winners of the Photography Prize will take place at the Théâtre de la Criée in Marseille. Will be represented : Anaïs Boudot, Claire Chevrier, Laurie Dall’Ava, Morgane Denzler, Patricia Di Fiore, Véronique Ellena, Evangelia Kranioti, Manuela Marques, Safaa Mazirh, Corine Mercadier, Wiktoria Wojciechowska & Sophie Zénon.
The current exhibition of works from the collection of Anne Gruner Schlumberger, de l’autre côté du rêve (from the other side of the dream) will take place until November 1st at the Bemberg Foundation in Toulouse.