Experimental Workshop and Book Activation

In celebration of March being Le Mois de la Francophonie (Francophone Month) we're offering an Experimental Workshop and Book Activation. In partnership with Dictionnaire des francophones, THNOC (Willams Research Center), the French Consulate in Louisiana and the Villa Albertine.

Free for members and nonmembers

About the Event:

We are proud to host University of Xavier professor in Performance Studies, Ross Louis as he presents his project Performer l’imaginaire de la Nouvelle-Orléans. This artistic research project questions the social construction of a “French” New Orleans. Join us as we delve into this interesting contemporary social investigation of a topic relevant to our own home of New Orleans.

The project Performer l’imaginaire de la Nouvelle-Orléans questions the social construction of a “French” New Orleans. Hosted by the Université Jean Moulin (Lyon) since 2019, the project has developed experimental and participatory methods to study the French imaginary of the city: observations and direct experiences from ordinary life are placed into conversation with archival documents to create a dialogue between the past and present.

To present the project and its most recent bilingual edition, Protocols for a perpetual imaginary (New Orleans), we invite you to participate in an experimental workshop that will activate the book through playful instructions. The book itself is organized around a series of protocols to be carried out by its readers, protocols which respond to the always evolving imaginaires of “French” New Orleans. Designed by Zenner-Issard (Strasbourg, France), the book assembles three years of results into a collection of materials (archival documents, French language terms, documentation from participatory experiments) that encourage the reader to react to, rearrange, or rethink the social imaginary of a place. The reader thus becomes a participant of the project, collaborating on the perpetual creation of new imaginaries of the city.

About the Speaker:
Ross Louis  works at the intersection of the ordinary, public space, performance and the archive. His research considers the archive in all its forms: material, place of creation, performative device, or theoretical concept. He often integrates performative protocols disseminated to the public in the form of editions (bookmark, inventory, pamphlet) in order to question the relationship between place, daily life and the archival document. He recently completed a fellowship from the European Commission (Marie Sklodowska-Curie, Horizon 2020) at Jean Moulin University, Lyon 3 where he integrated site-specific and interactive devices to question the “French" imagination. of New Orleans. His recent work on the links between colonial gardens and the transatlantic French slave trade has been published in the journals Thaêtre and Post-Scriptum. He is currently co-editing with Anolga Rodionoff a book on performance and the archive to be published by Éditions Hermann in 2023.