Figuraction

Art & Science Multidisciplinary Team, France

  • Elise Olmedo +

    Marseille, France

    Élise Olmedo is a geographer, now working on her post-doctoral research at the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (Mucem) and at the Norbert Elias Center, an anthropological laboratory in Marseille in the framework of the LabexMed. She uses mapping and drawing to note the research process in fieldwork. Her PhD dissertation (2015) deals with "sensory mapping" and how sensorial and emotional experiences manifest themselves in geographical images and maps. Her work aims to study the implementation of "sensory" cartography, how can sensations and emotions be materialized on maps. Furthermore, how fieldwork can be adapted to involve both participants and researchers. Since 2014, she has been collaborating with several research groups to promote interdisciplinary approaches between artists and researchers through experimentation. 

  • Amandine Maria +

    Vitrolles, France

    Born in 1980 in the city of Le Mans (France), Amandine Maria lives and works in Vitrolles in the south of France. She graduated from Aix-Marseille University (majoring in visual arts) and from the The National School of Landscape Architecture in Versailles. Highly sensitive to landscapes and gardens, she started conceiving and presenting outdoor artistic installations. In deepening her artistic practice through an interpretation of landscape and a study of landscape tools, she worked on sensorial and cartographic forms of territories. She doesn’t consider the landscape without walking through it. The landscape isn’t static and permanent. The lanscape is more like a dance that happen before our eyes. Walking allows us to observe that places are opening and unfolding like a surprising spectrum. The elements are slowly playing out, turning, touching each other or moving away according to the point of view of the walker. The map, with its representation in two dimensions, allows to represent the landscape which was opened. In the maps of Amandine Maria, everything is flatten and drawn according to the point of view lived within the experience. All of her maps are presentations of lived experiences and walks.

  • Mathias Poisson +

    Forcalquier, France

    Mathias Poisson is an artist, walker, and performer. He invites us to take a walk around unknown areas, along both known and unknown places, in fuzzy circumstances. Author of touristic experimental guides, drawer of sensory maps and activator of discordant landscapes, he generates places as playgrounds, trying to confuse the issues of local explorations. Mathias Poisson investigates the walk as a territory of artistic experimentation. He began this research in 2001 in Beyrouth when he started to study public space practices in Mediterranean cities. With his walks, he is also investigating maps, guides and sensory visits offered as choreographical experiences. He questions the modes of writing of walk experiences through notation, image, and performance.

  • Mathilde Christmann +

    Somme-Tourbe, France

    After an education in visual arts, history of landscape art, and art sciences, Mathilde Christmann has been working in the cultural field, mainly pursuing three lines: edition, teaching, and research. Her professional experience is entirely motivated by a drive for transmission, both practical and theoretical, to different kinds of audiences and through different media. A longterm collaboration with Élise Olmedo and Mathias Poisson, in which as a collective of artists and scholars they shared cartographic and choreographic practices, led her to articulate her research under an overarching inquiry: the question of the notation of bodily, spatial, and temporal experiences, and its capacity to act as a translation tool for our sensorial relationship to the world.

A White Walk in Istanbul, Mathias Poisson, April 5 2013

The project Figuraction follows the encounter between maps and movement notation firstly inspired by the work of American landscape architect Lawrence Halprin (1916-2009). This project is situated somewhere at the intersection of art, social sciences, and landscape architecture, through the collaboration of three artists (one visual artist, one colorist, and one performer) and a geographer: Mathilde Christmann, Amandine Maria, Élise Olmedo, and Mathias Poisson. Navigating through the universe of sensory mapping and choreographic dance, they explore the limits of the tools which are useful to the practice and the notation of spaces. By leaving well-known paths to explore less known territories in the fields of research and creation, they cross-fertilize scientific and artistic perspective to eventually question the disciplinary limits, perimeters, and pre-established categories of such tools.

This residence questioned the boundaries between cartography and choreographic notation, using the shared works of Mathilde Christmann, Élise Olmedo, Amandine Maria and Mathias Poisson. The proposal of "maps-scores" ("cartes-partitions" in French) was seen as a navigation tool. It articulated descriptions of sensorial experiments and the possibility of experiences to come; this tool reflects a process which traces the experience at the same time as it guides the exploration. With the walk as a common and shared condition of experience, with the "maps-scores" as a research tool, the team was willing to question the translation from the sensory to the written, from the living condition to what have been experienced, and therefore experiment the process which transforms an event of the sensory to a writing track. The primary attention to site-specific experience and its writing process invited to question interdisciplinary approaches on landscape. Interdisciplinary points of view are linked to question the porous nature of sensorial experience. 

The team was in residence at Camargo from January 7 to February 4, 2019, in partnership with LabexMed.