Futurs de l'écriture

The Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme is organising an evening to present the next Polygraphe(s) issue "Futurs de l'écriture", to be published on 26 September by Éditions de la MSH.

This Livres en Dialogue session will bring together the magazine's director Philippe Hamueau, coordinators Béatrice Fraenkel and Francesca Cozzolino in conversation with journalist and literary critic Sylvie Tanette.

At the end of the meeting, you will have the opportunity to ask our guests any questions you may have. The meeting will be followed by a convivial moment.

This issue is an attempt to respond to Arjun Appadurai's invitation to develop an "anthropology of the future" that would account for "the construction of cultural futures". We have therefore focused on writing practices that seem to us, for the most part, to fall within the three concerns that, according to him, shape the future: imagination, anticipation and aspiration. The aim of this issue is to highlight and discuss the new uses of writing in the major fields that we have chosen because of their vitality as writers: activist movements, artistic writing and the world of writing professionals (researchers, graphic designers).

• Philippe Hameau is an anthropologist at the Université Côte d'Azur. His work focuses on graphic acts, diachronically, from recent prehistory to the present day. His work focuses on explaining the variability of iconographic corpuses by studying their social, cultural and ideal contexts, while at the same time seeking to identify the rules that run through the graphic act, whatever the cultural environment in which it takes place. His main themes are the painted and engraved iconography of the Neolithic and medieval periods, the inscriptions that accompany Christian sanctuaries, graffiti in prisons and the phenomenon of tags and graffiti in the hip-hop context. Philippe Hameau also works in the field of the ethnology of rural societies and their contemporary transformations and/or survival. He chairs the ASER association in the Centre-Var, the 48th member of IFRAO. He is director of the journal Polygraphe(s), published by the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme.

• Béatrice Fraenkel is Emeritus Director of Studies at EHESS, where she holds the Chair in the Anthropology of Writing. Since her first book, La Signature, Genèse d'un signe (Gallimard 1992), her teaching and research have taken a pragmatic approach to writing. She co-curated the exhibition ‘Affiche-Action: quand la politique s'affiche dans la rue’ at the BDIC (Hôtel des Invalides, November 2012-February 2013) and co-authored the catalogue (2012). She is co-director of several research projects on ‘exposed writing’ in urban spaces, including ‘Écritures exposées : La fabrique de l'espace public’ Iris Scripta, PSL-EHESS (2016-2022).

• Francesca Cozzolino is an anthropologist and teacher at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (EnsAD), a researcher at EnsadLab, EnsAD's art and design research laboratory, and an affiliated member of the Laboratoire d'Ethnologie et Sociologie Comparative (LESC-CNRS) at the University of Paris Nanterre. Specialising in the ethnography of artistic practices, she works at the crossroads of visual studies and the anthropology of art and material culture. She regularly collaborates with artists and designers on research-creation projects with a strong experimental and speculative dimension.

• Sylvie Tanette is a journalist and literary critic. She has worked for Radio Suisse Romande's cultural channel (Espace 2), as well as for the magazine L'Hebdo in Lausanne and the daily Le Temps in Geneva. In France, she has been a columnist for Le Monde des Livres and France Culture.