Contenu du sommaire : Parler nature

Giving Voice to Those who Remain Connected with Nature
The weekly radio broadcast Terre à terre, on France Culture, provides a tribune for voices of resistance, struggles, emotions and marvels, that manage to express a rich connection with nature in its concreteness. In this interview, Ruth Stégassy, the program's producer, talks about the way she manages to let these voices feel comfortable enough to emerge, as well as about her vision of what nature represents in our current struggles and political movements.

A Forrest of Signs : The Interspecificity of Narration among New Guinea Kasua People
This article decides to integrates the interspecific character of the narrative performance by Kasua of New Guinea and analyzes the story they experiment in their quite human attempts to remedy the disorders of their forest world.

Literary Conception of Postcolonial Caribbean Ecology
In addition to the millions displaced by the slave trade, the unprecedented violence against Amerindian peoples entirely decimated, to the ecological collapse and to centuries of slavery, one of the most important consequences of European colonization of the Caribbean remains the apparent disappearance of stories. This article focuses on the decolonial scope of the search and genesis of ecological stories as traces of resistance through the literatures of this region.

Probable Systems against Possible Worlds : Data-Mythology and Environment
Much of the earth-related discourse is based on data which, being what they are, condition the narrative they offer. They entail a hefty ecological foodprint, and also a risk of ontological deprivation, and marginalisation of hermeneutics ; that is, they provide unescapable models for our imaginations and of the future itself.

When the Disease Carries the Body Away
This contribution presents an ongoing investigation and research program about diseases, their articulation to the concept of nature and how limited the knowledge, languages and vocabularies we develop around them both can be. The intervention addresses the lack of odes to illness and of books written in languages that could invent and re-create nature's senseless fluctuations. It highlights the invention of pain diagnosis, with specific scales and vocabulary. It questions what happens on blogs & forums.

Emergency Conversations
In this article, I adress the issue of “the discourse overtaken by the situation” as a component pertaining to any social event and not as something uncanny and rarely witnessed. Indeed, the organisation of discourse-in-interaction entails a context that this very discourse will reflexively contribute to structure. I point out this idea using medical emergency calls data, whose analyses magnify social phenomena that one could nonetheless observe in many (ordinary) social practices. Therefore, I highlight an endogeneous perspective on context and introduce a discussion on the interactionaly-based concepts of information and normality.

Sound, Sense, Stupor
Respiratory accidents respond to hazards of life. Interjections and onomatopoeia constitute, in effect, our first attempts to express what makes up an event. Situated between raw sound and language, they allow us –as we hypothesize– to identify what we are not able to grasp or qualify. In doing this, they have a “therapeutic power” that consists of expressing something that happens, even while this same thing stupefies us. The usage of onomatopoeia can thus be envisioned as a “cultural option” by which we deal with catastrophes, an idea that we study through forms of Japanese expression.

Field recording : Critical Hypotheses
Through the diversity of field recording's uses (sometimes support for soundscape studies, sometimes composition tool for music and environments but always depend on—inter—cultural context), David Christoffel and Guillaume Tiger investigate some relation to nature. How do we speak of nature through field recordings? What is the meaning of Nature within musical composition processes? How do we give “justice” to nature through the creation of virtual soundscapes? The authors exchange on these matters, their points of view rotating in opposite directions around the same melting pot of natural sonorities.

The Demoiselles' War or the Insurrection of the Third Language1829 saw the start of one of the eeriest peasant revolts in French modern history, “the Demoiselles'War”, a mountain guerilla aimed at earning back ancestral land rights. However, the rebellion is also characterized by the deployment of a fantastic and poetical language across the landscape, marking a shift from habitation to haunting as well as the simultaneous crisis of the prosaic and the poetical, of habitation and discourse.

Exiting the Anthropocene
The anthropocene should be written “entropocene”, i.e., a period of mass production of entropy due to the fact that many fields of knowledge have been abolished and liquidated : they no longer belong to human knowledge, but offer closed systems of automatic reactions, which, as such, present high levels of entropy. The new criterion of redistribution needed in our age of Neguanthropocene must be based on our capacity to disautomatize and resuscitate a whole range of human operations.

From the January revolution to Sisi
The argument this article attempts to develop is that the revolution in Egypt had a relatively clear liberal democratic political project. Revolutionary groups and political opponents to the Mubarak regime managed to mobilize substantial social strata in 2011 asking for the respect of basic human rights and for the representation of the will of the people. The strong presence of disaffected laborers, impoverished middle classes and urban poor in the protest movement never evolved into a political project aiming at social and economic change. Their demands conversely remained by and large stuck in the Nasserist moral economy, where economic and social demands are largely apolitical and definitely dissociated from the democratization of society-state relations. The absence of a project of socio-political change deprived the revolutionary process of a solid and broad social coalition.

Cairo, rebel city?
The 2011 revolution has opened a path for a specific form of activism which has focused mainly on urban territory. The Egyptian urban activism pleads for dropping out the rational urban planification's mechanisms and condemns the way the government and the international development agencies have based their practices and actions on the private companies models. Going back to the neo liberal politics outlined by Mubarak which failed to reduce urban poverty, the large-scaled projects initiated by Sisi has cut down the progress that has been observed since the revolution in the field of urbanism and urban developemnt.

Ard-el-Lewa
Interview with Hamdy Reda, an artist who created an art space, Art-el-Lewa, in an informal densely populated area, Ard-el-Lewa, located between two of Cairo's largest informal areas, Imbiba and Boulak El Dakrour. Art-el-Lewa is a space for the formation and activation of dialogue between artists and society. This independant agency facilitates artists projects, offers workshops for community members and emerging artists, exhibits art and hosts artists-in-residence in addition to providing special projects to enrich the civic and cultural life in Ard-el-Lewa, and using art to improve the urban environment. Hamdy Reda tells us why and how he opened this space what projects Art-el-Lewa hosted.

Cimatheque, Alternative Film Center
Cimatheque – Alternative Film Centre is a multi-purpose venue located in the heart of downtown Cairo. It opened its doors to the public on June 3 2015. It came from the wish of young filmmakers to create an independent production agency. Following the revolution, the scope of the project expanded, bringing about the idea to build an analogue hand-processing lab, the only one of its kind in the country, in the hopes of reviving a lost art form that capitulated in recent years to the cost-effectiveness of digital filmmaking. And because everything that was being implemented in Cimatheque till this point arose from a desire to at once respect legacies and collective histories, while deconstructing their meanings in the current political and social climate, the idea of devoting a room or two to film archives came into being. This concern is central to the way in which Cimatheque's team approaches programming based on film history and archiving, with the hope that it can give voice and expression to peripheral memories, and material made on the margins of society.

Islamic feminism and the Equivocation of Political Engagement
The recent rise and fall of the Islamist rule in Egypt calls for reflection, not just on the role of Islamic feminist ideas in society, but also on the shifting political grounds and questions of ethical and principled opposition. The presentation of this subject does not take the approach of the usual secular/Islamist binary or a criticism of secular liberalism, but is rather focused on a critique of any feminist movement, be it secular or Islamic, that allows itself to be co-opted and silenced by corrupt political regimes. This article, in its first part, discusses the general issue of the precarious relationship between feminists and the state, especially in the modern Egyptian context, and, in its second part, looks into the moral ambiguities associated with Islamic feminism's political stands.

Shifting
Interview with Anna Roussillon, filmmaker Franco-Egyptian, who made the documentary “I am the people”. As the Egyptian people rises up in Tahrir Square, rural villagers in the south are watching the revolution on TV. From the overthrow of Mubarak to the fall of Morsi, the film follows the upheavals through the eyes of Farraj, a peasant in the Nile valley near Luxor. In the daily life of the farmer, between hopes and disappointments, change is a long time coming. Anna Roussillon talks about the role of tv in political culture in this area, about women, and about her choice of not focusing her filming on Tahrir square.