Journées Bleues

Maria Elisa Amadasi is a researcher in archaeology at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where, as part of the ERC « IN-ROME » project, she is studying Rome’s hydraulic and road infrastructures in the imperial period. She specialized in classical archaeology at Rome’s La Sapienza University, where, in 2023, she defended her doctoral thesis on the Aqua Virgo. This thesis retraced the history of the aqueduct from antiquity to the present day, and furthered our knowledge of this monument. The study of ancient and epigraphic sources, archival documents and published texts was complemented by surface surveys and explorations in underground tunnels. Speleological explorations have made it possible to map certain sections of the Aqueduct, such as the canal running beneath Villa Medici.

French author and researcher Pauline André-Dominguez is committed to telling the world’s story through literatures of the real that combine facts and the art of storytelling.

After freelancing in narrative journalism on transition issues until 2019, she is now working at the Centre de Recherche sur les Arts et le Langage de Paris (EHESS-CNRS) on zoopoetic research-creation with ecologists from the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle (CESCO, MNHN).

Her thesis, conducted as part of the Ocean and Climate Priority Research Program (CNRS, Ifremer), brings together literature and ocean sciences to share knowledge about marine life in a context of ecological transition.

Juliette Bessette is an art historian at the University of Lausanne. She has carried out a number of studies on the history of the scientific imagination through the prism of art and visual culture. Her current research focuses on artistic representations of the ocean and marine life since the early 20th century. Combining art history on the one hand, and the history and philosophy of marine sciences on the other, she aims to establish a genealogy of sensitive relations to the ocean during a period of environmental upheaval. In 2024, she organized a symposium in Marseille entitled « Une histoire de l’art bleue. Artistic creation, biodiversity and the ocean environment (XIXth-XXIst centuries) ».

A historian of gardens, landscape and ecology, Hervé Brunon is Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and a member of the prestigious Centre André Chastel (Unité Mixte de Recherche 8150, affiliated with Sorbonne University, CNRS and the Ministry of Culture, Paris). His research focuses on the interrelations between societies and environments. He explores themes such as symbolism, memory and aesthetic experience in the context of gardens and landscapes, from Antiquity to the present day, adopting a resolutely interdisciplinary approach that includes ecology, archaeology, philosophy and anthropology.

In her work, Yasmine El Amri is interested in the adhesions between spatial planning and what pre-exists it. Since 2018, she has been developing the Model(s)sculpture-perimeter exploring the domestication of water. In 2023, this project will receive a grant from Aide Individuelle à la Création. Model(s) is the subject of numerous texts by the artist, and at the end of 2023 contributed to the writing of a novel. In 2024, she was invited by Galerie Anne-Laure Buffard to read extracts from her forthcoming book. From 2021, she writes and presents a series of performances How do rivers flow? These are presented at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles in Paris, during the Littérature Etc festival in Lille, and at Pauline Perplexe in Paris. In her latest performance Becoming a Viaductpresented at Maison Poème in Brussels, she explores her relationship with infrastructures as objects of desire, and how they outlive and entangle her. Her texts have been published in Precious Liquid Magazine and by Notabilia.

Laure Limongi‘s preference for expression and the book is manifested through various artistic gestures. A writer, Laure Limongi has published a dozen works, including The Invention of the Sea (to be released by Tripode in January 2025), On ne peut pas tenir la mer entre ses mains (« One Cannot Hold the Sea in One’s Hands ») (Grasset, 2019, Prix du livre corse, Prix de la collectivité de Corse), Anomalie des zones profondes du cerveau (« Anomaly of the Deep Brain Zones ») (Grasset, 2015, shortlisted for the Médicis Prize)… She also develops artistic and performed forms, presented in France and abroad, such as Service des Panacées (« The Service of Panaceas »), which creates a dialogue between literature and medicine. Laure Limongi was also an editor for around fifteen years, and after co-directing the Master’s in Literary Creation at Le Havre, she teaches at the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy. In 2023-2024, she was a resident at Villa Medici, French Academy in Rome.

Rose-Lynn Fisher has specialized in macro and micro-photography for many years. Her research attempts to materialize, to make visible through the image, physical manifestations of the order of the impalpable. The extreme variety and dissimilarity between each of her tear studies reveals the infinity of Man, the existence of a multitude of territories within ourselves, and as many

Silvia Ginzburg is Professor of Modern Art History in the Department of Humanistic Studies at the University of Rome Tre. Her main research interests are painting and artistic literature of the 16th and 17th centuries. She is the creator and coordinator of an NRRP project entitled Along the Aqueduct. Artists active in construction and decoration sites for humanist patrons along the route of the Aqua Virgo, from the periphery to the center of Rome in the 16th century.

Nina Leger is a writer. She has published Mise en pièces (Gallimard, 2017), for which she received the Anaïs Nin Prize and the Prix littéraire de la Vocation. The book has been translated and published in English by Granta under the title The Collection.

More recently, Nina Leger published Antipolis (Gallimard, 2021), a novel dedicated to the Sophia-Antipolis technology park. Her project at the Villa Albertine allows her to pursue her reflection on the writing of places and their contested histories.

Alongside her writing, Nina Leger teaches art history and theory at the Beaux-arts in Marseille.

Francesca Mari holds a doctorate in Modern Art History from the University of Roma Tre, and a PhD in Historic-Artistic Heritage from the Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna and in « Comparative Studies: Languages, Literatures and Arts » from the University of Rome « Tor Vergata », where she currently teaches. She is a research fellow at the University of Roma Tre in the project coordinated by Professor Silvia Ginzburg: Along the Aqueduct on artists active in the construction and decoration of sites for humanist patrons along the route of the Aqua Virgo, from the periphery to the center of Rome in the 16th century.

Archivist of love, activist of intimacy and poet, Morgane Ortin, a literature graduate from La Sorbonne and former editorial director of the DesLettres publishing house specializing in the publication of letters by great writers, is the founder of a project to archive intimate messages written in French all over the world called Amours solitaires, as well as the author of a first bestseller of the same name published by Albin Michel, translated into seven languages. She is working to bring therapeutic writing, the epistolary genre and poetry back into the spotlight through an inclusive, participatory and accessible approach. With her penultimate book, Le secret, the author has abandoned the shores of love for the abysses of intimacy. Her first poetry collection, La chambre sans murs, aims to revisit the poetic genre with a free and uninhibited approach, tackling themes of rupture and healing. In 2021, she published an epistolary writing notebook, Toutes les lettres ne sont pas des lettres d’amour (ou peut-être le sont-elles?), published by Leduc, followed in 2023 by Le club des Larmes, a therapeutic notebook in which she explores the history of our tears, while reconciling readers with their own sobs.

Myriam Rabah-Konaté dances, writes, translates and produces sound documentaries between Marseille, Rabat and the 93. I nterpreter for Radouan Mriziga (Libya), she also teaches improvised dance. Exploring the geographic and diasporic spaces that are dear to her, she practices sensitive cartography and produces radio documentaries for France Culture : Listen to La Muette (2023) ; What disappears (2024). In 2024, she co-wrote her first children’s book, Le Nil, fleuve des pharaons, and co-translated, with Emma Bigé and Mabeuko Oberty, a feminist work by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, continuing her artistic and political commitment.

Lara Tabet is a Lebanese biologist and visual artist based in Marseille. A graduate in clinical pathology from the American University of Beirut and in photography from the International Center of Photography in New York, thanks to the Lisette Model grant, her work explores the body, space and questions of gender, sexuality and identity.

His work has been shown at the Taipei Biennale (2023), the Institut du Monde Arabe (2022), Rencontres d’Arles (2019) and in solo exhibitions at Galerie Janine Rubeiz (Underbelly, 2019). Lauréate de prix et bourses prestigieux, notamment le Prince Claus Mentorship Award (2022) et le Prix du Musée Sursock (2018), elle a également participé à des résidences artistiques majeures, comme à la Fondation Camargo (2024). Professeure de photographie, elle a enseigné à l’Université Américaine de Beyrouth et à Salzbourg.