Marina Chauliac

Laureate of the 2023 Arts programme

Marina Chauliac is an anthropologist, a member of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie du Politique (LAP – UMR8177 CNRS/EHESS), and a Fellow at the Institut Convergences Migrations. She has worked on post-communist rituals and memory, the processes of memorial and heritage qualification of migration traces, and from 2020 to 2022, she led an interdisciplinary research program at ICM on public bathhouses. For several years, particularly within the LALCA association, she has been involved in various research-creation projects focusing on sensory experiences and intimacy in public spaces.

The project

Title: Access to rest. The creation of shelter, and spaces and times of intimacy in situations of homelessness or inadequate housing.

"This research explores access to rest, the construction of shelter, and the spaces and temporalities of intimacy in situations of inadequate or absent housing. Similar to access to water, hygiene, and healthcare, people experiencing “precarious time” develop “tactics,” in Michel de Certeau’s sense, to meet their fundamental needs by appropriating and transforming public space.

This project thus examines the conditions of access to rest and dreaming for individuals deprived of conventional housing—whether homeless, nomadic workers, asylum seekers, or those denied asylum—by focusing on public spaces, bodies, and imaginaries.

Adopting a participatory and interdisciplinary approach that combines anthropology, sociology, architectural studies, as well as sound and visual creation, this study seeks to envision, together with those directly affected, a more inclusive and welcoming city. The aim is to conceive an urban environment that is tolerant and permeable, capable of accommodating both its residents and those in transit."

Institution: EHESS

Selected publications

"En avoir le corps net. Norms and Sensory Experiences in Municipal Bathhouses", Géographie et cultures [Online], 120-121 | 2024.
"Is There an Age for Remembering?", in Sarah Gensburger and Sandrine Lefranc (eds.), La mémoire collective en question(s), Paris, PUF, "Le lien social," 2023.
"In the Intimacy of Public Bathhouses: A Collective Research-Creation Experience", with LALCA (Florent Ottello, Corentine Baudrand, Julie Bernard), ethnographiques.org, Issue 42 - December 2021. Rencontres ethno-artistiques [Online]
Immigration at the Borders of Heritage, with Noël Barbe (eds.), Paris, Éditions de la MSH, Ethnologie de la France Collection, Cahier No. 28, 2014.