As part of the Ambiances International Network, three one-day sessions were organized in France between January and June 2009. These exploratory encounters addressed the sharing of sensory experience in an urban environment.
How do urban atmospheres express shared forms of sensibility and ways of being together. To what extent do they accompany forms of co-existence in public spaces? What place does the sensory occupy in the formation of urban cultures and sociability in its many forms?
In posing such questions our aim was to test ordinary culture against the sensory and to take a new look at the stakes for interculturality in the light of the aesthetic question. Rather than regarding a culture as a homogeneous whole, closed in on itself and often reduced to little more than an ethnic variable, we proposed to describe cultures as dynamic processes bringing about adjustments, transformation and sedimentation of the sensory frameworks of our daily lives (embracing all sensory modalities). With atmosphere, we are talking about a new way of addressing urban experience, paying particular attention to the sensory forms of social life, to the slight sensations of impregnation of a place, the corporeal expressions of city-dwellers, and to the often infra-conscious ways of being which bring us into contact with others.
To address these questions we focused in particular on changes of scene (dépaysement) in an urban setting. A change of scene means a relation to our surroundings that is marked by a momentary loss or attenuation of our bearings in daily life and of the system of pertinence on which we rely in our ongoing affairs. This break in our habits may occur with a trip abroad, during an artistic event in town, following the consumption of illegal substances, in association with a particularly enigmatic, unexpected event, or when exploring a town blind or with mufflers on our ears. We did not restrict the phenomenon of a change of scene to a strictly spatial or geographic component. By unsettling perceptive routines, upsetting the urban ordinary and decentering the perceiving subject, dépaysement helped us to shed light on what lends a public space or an urban situation a more or less familiar face. So, by looking at familiar atmospheres in their relative strangeness, we were able to investigate the self-evidences of sensory life in common.
Experiencing a change of scene constituted the guiding thread of the three one-day sessions which unfolded as follows:
- Bodies and intercorporeality in public spaces, jointly organized in Lyon by Anne Jarrigeon and Rachel Thomas
- Ordinary aesthetics and forms of urban life, jointly organized in Grenoble by Sandra Fiori and Nathalie Simmonot
- Politics of the sensory and languages of the city, jointly organized in Paris by Henri-Pierre Jeudy and Nicolas Tixier
Coordination : Jean-Paul Thibaud – International Ambiances Network coordinator
Summary
Summary
Summary
