What the stones say

In October 2020, Storm Alex hit the Alpes-Maritimes. Phenomenal weather conditions have resulted in flooding and landslides torrential lava flows in the Vésubie and Roya valleys. As part of the New Worlds program of the Ministry of Culture, the novelist Colombe Boncenne in association with the artist/designer David Enon, and five other artist-authors, the sculptor Julien Berthier, the choreographer Julie Desprairies, the musician Charles Dubois, the architect Laure Dezeuze and the sociologist Livia Velpry were invited to come and discuss and share their views on this event and its stigmata. After two residencies in Saint-Martin Vésubie, they created and produced there together a three-day event inspired by the folk tale traditional “Stone Soup” which served as breeding ground for a fiction written collectively. The main plot takes place in Saint-Martin Vésubie, and allows us to describe the landscape after the disaster, its impermanence, its perpetual motion, its transitory reality. Now this reality includes, without the directly cite the artistic productions that were carried out during the event, makes them appear as phenomena that the local population fails to explain. Evidence, or exhibits – texts, drawings, photographs - are interspersed in the text. In appendices, a article and a diagram provide valuable information on the phenomenon meteorological and its consequences. The object is protean, it is carried by the idea that we can question the real – even tragic – through fiction and offer the possibility to the imagination to breathe life into places where it no longer seems to have any hold. It is a question also to go beyond the logic of the event and to register an experience artistic as singular as it is ephemeral in a longer time, that of book, reflexivity.