Mira Sanders: A fragment of "Le journal d’un usager de l’espace".

Doctoral Project

Mira Sanders, PhD in the Arts

A fragment of "Le journal d’un usager de l’espace". The tracing of a Roman Road.

Le journal d’un usager de l’espace is a heterogeneous artistic practice in which the interest is focused on a space that’s at the same time geographical, sensory and social. In my Doctorate in the Arts, I outline step by step The Tracing of a Roman Road 1 and examine narrative practices within an artistic context through photography, video, drawings, sound, writing… By means of tracing and with walking as a driving force, The Tracing of a Roman Road investigates tactics to assimilate a place and its population as objective material into an artistic vocabulary. It crystallises concepts linked to the (Roman) Road such as colonisation, (tele)communication, the infrastructure of networks, ingenuity, ‘being on the way’, road diversions, etc… in a contemporary light. The investigation focuses rather on walking off the established paths (see GR walking routes) so as to trace the unheard-of (find a track, create a track) and explain it via a new visual territory (a topos-poetry). Thus, an atlas of narratives gradually comes into being during the doctorate, narratives which originate from the personal experiences on and around the Roman Road. The narrative takes the form of a line of thought, a scenario, or something linguistic – or all three simultaneously. The atlas juxtaposes two and three-dimensional narratives developed at scale with photos, drawings, models, installations, films, testimonies, maps… The Tracing of a Roman Road comprises two sections: a. The tracing of the Roman Road and the tactic to explain the space(s) through media such as photos, drawings, sound, video, writing... brought together in an atlas of narratives. b. Contextualising the artistic production in a collection of annotations: visual and textual essays, essays that discuss relations with other artists, palm-of-the-hand stories, memoirs, poems…

Supervisors:

  • Filip De Boeck (Supervisor)
  • Johan Verbeke (Co-supervisor)

Duration 2012-2016

Contact: mira.sanders@kuleuven.be

Mira Sanders