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12th IAWIS/AIERTI International Conference: Water and the Sea in Texts and Images
12–16 July 2021 – online conference
“Ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ (Water is the best thing in the world)” (Pindar)
“Our planet Earth should be called Sea” (Erik Orsenna)
At a time when water scarcity is looming and when the continent is affected, even deep in its epicentre, by what is happening on its shores, it seemed urgent to us to propose this topic, both rich in imagination and of burning relevance.
In Alessandro Baricco’s novel Ocean Sea (1993), the fictional painter Plasson paints the sea with seawater. This emblematic scene somehow sums up our theme: water is an element that is difficult to pin down, and yet it concerns us more and more. Formless, it is always waiting to be defined, even resisting any effort at conceptualisation. Putting water and the sea into words and images is not self-evident; it is a real discursive and visual challenge and therefore particularly likely to call into question the relationship between text and image. By virtue of its “unmeasured” rhythm (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980), the aquatic element transcends the dichotomy between the arts of time and the arts of space introduced by Lessing (cf. Louvel, 2002).
The unspeakable nature of water is not its invisibility. And yet, literary or visual investments (water stories…) form a true semiosphere with, on its periphery, a zone of “violation of semiotic links” (Lotman, 1966), the realm of the unstable, the arbitrary, the inexplicable.
Luxembourg, a country at the centre of the European continent – but we know how well the centre fares if the periphery is healthy –, stronghold of the mermaid Mélusine, a territory that prides itself on its natural springs and its thermalism, seems to us the appropriate place to host a world congress around this theme.
A short tour of the Belval campus and Luxembourg:
