Cartographie du Verdanson : Itinéraire poétique
Mapping the Verdanson: a poetry walk
21st May 2019
Écrire en mouvement est un festival d’ateliers d’écriture et de traduction créative en itinérance dans les villes de Montpellier et Nîmes. http://ecrireenmouvement.com/
Ce parcours a été mené par Zoë Skoulding, enseignante-chercheuse et poète, & Aurélia Lassaque, poète occitane.
Départ : Maison de la Poésie-Jean Joubert (78, avenue du Pirée / Quartier Antigone)
Une déambulation créatrice sur les rives du Verdanson, une cartographie poétique de son parcours, de ses méandres, de sa mémoire.
Aurélia Lassaque and I were invited by Lily Robert-Foley and Claire Musiol to contribute to create a public poetry walk through Montpellier. We began at the Maison de la Poésie, the House of Poetry. The route we walked along the channels and culverts of Montpellier’s lost river, the Verdanson, took us past extravagant graffiti (not all poetry lives in a house) and a tent next to a temple (not all people do either). How does tracing the route of a river enable us to think about what else, other than a river, might be excluded from the space of the city? What vanished industries can be deciphered in street names and architecture? Participants collaboratively mapped the route as we talked about the city, and Aurélia directed an outdoor performance of our responses. The event took place on a day of public-sector strikes, which we supported by re-routing the final part of the walk away from the planned finale at the university, and drawing into our discussion the question of how we might make better spaces and structures in which to live together.
This river, aka Merdanson, has much in common with other vanished urban rivers, such as the Bièvre in Paris or the Afon Adda in Bangor. See bangoradda.org
