PERSONA: FROM UNREST INTO ADAPTATION
Luiz OOSTERBEEK is graduated in history and PhD in archeology. He is a coordinating professor and the vice president of the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar (IPT), Center for Geosciences at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. There, he directs master’s and doctoral courses in prehistoric and quaternary studies (jointly with the University of Vila Real) and is visiting professor at many universities in Europe and Brazil. He is also a member of the International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences (CISP, UNESCO), Secretary General of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences, Vice-President of HERITY International, former spokesperson for science and society CYTED, director of various archaeological projects as well as heritage and territory management projects in Portugal, Brazil, Colombia, Senegal and Angola. Director of the Prehistoric Art Museum of Mação (Tajo, Portugal) and of the Quaternary group (Portuguese Geoscience Center), he is also the prolix author of around thirty books and around 200 papers (see http://ipt.academia.edu/LuizOosterbeek). That is to say if his gaze and analysis are precious to us in the context of modernity and its socio-cultural evolution! His essay indeed poses major questions on the understanding and management of human needs subject to globalization, technosciences, cognitive biases, as well as on its relationship to nature. An in-depth analysis of the discomfort of our contemporary societies and the responses to be provided, both in terms of spatiotemporal perception, territoriality and free will of human choices in a given environment, as in terms of contextual influences (uncertainties, assimilation of big data, increasing mobility, social inclusion, etc.), with the concrete example of managing the agricultural landscape in the Tagus valley.
IN SEARCH OF A PLASTIC SEMIOTICS
Frédéric MATHEVET, plastic artist and composer, is doctor of arts and associate professor of plastic arts. Co-editor in chief of the review L’Autre Musique, he is an associate artist-researcher at the ACTE Institute [École des Arts de la Sorbonne_EA 7539] Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He has published numerous articles on the figure of the artist-researcher and on the sound arts and a book on the plastic modalities of sound and musical writing: Make Skin … Music at the Risk of Plasticity, textbooks visual arts volumes 1 and 2, Eds. Universitaires Européennes, Sept. 2010 (https://www.fredericmathevet.com/). His essay initiates the basic question he poses in a forthcoming work: « How to think about research in art and with art? « . It is a question of not ignoring an artistic practice worthy of the name and of giving the creative process a status which is not solely focused on their scientific and / or purely academic added value. For the author, only the notion of plasticity, understood as a triple movement – a movement of « give-receive-destroy » is capable of creating the conditions for research-creation and constitutes an all-out process of deconstructions, of precarious formalizations and continual metamorphoses (more precisely, shape shifting). As a result, plasticity makes the form significant, a temporary update whose endurance is strong enough to be noticed. From an ontological point of view, form is no longer a presence defined by intrinsic properties.
» NO ! « , A PUBLIC CRY. POLITICAL SCIENCE AND ARTS.
Christian RUBY is a philosopher, lecturer at ESAD-TALM, Tours site (Master level). He is a member of ADHC (association for the development of cultural history), ATEP (Tunisian association of aesthetics and poietics), of the collective Entre-Deux (Nantes, whose vocation is public art ) as well as the Observatory of the freedom of creation. He works with the FRAC Center Val-de-Loire and is a member of the Research commission of the Ministry of Culture. Among his latest works: Abécédaire des arts et de la culture, Toulouse, Éditions L’Attribut, 2015; Become a spectator? Invention and mutation of the cultural public, Toulouse, Éditions L’Attribut, 2017; « Shout, and shout! Nine notes on the cry of indignation and dissent, Brussels, La lettre volée, 2019. (www.christianruby.net). He recently published several articles in the field of art and science in Plastir. In this new original essay, he launches a cry of alert as to the socio-political drifts that lie in wait for us and enjoins us to observe them through the prism of art: “If we are willing to listen to the cries deployed in a society, you quickly realize that they are saying something about social relationships, domination and social violence. But in general, we neglect them, or we refer them to individual drive sources that should be treated. This text is set aside from these contempt for the cry, showing that it is necessary to hear and understand them. The arts also help shift perspective.”
THE WISDOMS OF THE WORLD IN THE PLURAL… THE WAYS OF A VOICE
Mar THIERIOT, whose post-doc « Two pianos prepared ... »(Plastir 14, 03/09 to Plastir 17, 12/09) and numerous essays have been published in our review, is a French philosopher, poet and painter Brazilian whose route has been described in detail in the summary of the issue 48 of Plastir. Her present contribution touches on the teachings of wisdom, its roots and the multiplicity of paths it takes, especially among the Toltecs. The result is notions of « just » and unsuspected passages in and between the ways, readings and paths with several issues and seeds carried here and there in the depths of creation. Better than anyone, Mariana Thieriot sums up her approach and the contribution of her peers in these terms: « Following the beautiful and strong traces of René Barbier, I write wisdoms in the plural and try in this study over the years to open the field to listen to the first peoples, religious traditions, myths tales and legends … Listening to poems too, and all these ways that we are made, all these voices that speak with us and in us , sometimes well in spite of us. The invariant in this journey remains the concept of dialogue, skilfully worked to the body and to the heart by Paulo Freire in Brazil and Norman Cornett in Canada, with whom I have the joy of exchanging, but not the ease. Norman Cornett, PhD in Religious Studies, practices a « dialogic » philosophy that intertwines the fields of education and the arts. Dialogue is also the transdisciplinary tool par excellence, practiced with tenacity and plasticity by Basarab Nicolescu, Marc-Williams Debono and all the members of the CIRET, the spearhead of Philippe Meirieu’s pedagogy, the dream of Martin Luther King… Dialogue is the great risk to run, the part to be pursued to the end when we try to hoist his life to a Sapiens species Sapiens. Difficult to summarize, this study opens the ball to dialogues on the wisdoms of the world, perhaps so that the Institute of Wisdoms of the world created by René Barbier and of which I am co-founder lives if not in one place, at least in our memories. «