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Elise Olmedo, Amandine Maria, Mathias Poisson, and Mathilde Christmann

Performer, Colorist, Geographer and Visual Artist

France
Multidisciplinary Arts
Artist & Scholar

Project: Figuraction 

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. This residency was in partnership with LabexMed, Aix-Marseille University.