Each social science discipline has its own way of collecting data. In geography, doing fieldwork constitutes the basis of investigation. As a science of places, geography’s objective is to meet the multiple ways of inhabiting the world. Our scope of research is not only interested in the narratives about space or the development of a territory, but also in the daily, changing, and contrasting narratives of the people who live there. Interested in the place of the everyday life, this approach invites social sciences to open up their practices and methods.
The survey we are conducting on the Esch 2022 territory focuses on a cross-border territory whose characteristic is to be plural. Listening to the places and people who live there requires inventiveness. A team of geographers, sociologists, theatre studies scholars, and artists have therefore come together to question this region using various tools. In short, we wanted to understand what motivates attachments to places, what develops affect for or, on the contrary, what characterizes antagonistic effects between people and the places. To do this, our tools were of four kinds:
- In situ interviews: They are similar to the classic interviews but consist of asking a person to bring us to a place of their choice to explain why this place is important to them. These 60+ interviews were conducted between May 2021 and April 2022. Thanks again to all those who accepted our invitation.
- Creative workshops: Started in July 2021, Remix Place proposed a series of workshops to inhabitants to take different approaches to places that matter: participatory mapping; writing workshops; storytelling; photo-language; and public voice workshops (criée publique). All these group practices aim to question what we have to say. They aim at the symbolic, emotional, and emancipating language of the sometimes-forgotten stories of the great History. Examples of groups include: Geopoetic Camp in Lassauvage, monthly workshops at the Residence Stéphane Hessel, multiple groups in Esch-sur-Alzette, workshops created for the children of the Villerupt City Council, and a seminar organized for the students of the Master of Theatre program at the Belval campus. Thanks to the participants and partners who facilitate these meetings.
- Multi-sensorial practices of places: With the help of a photographer and a sound artist, places were not only apprehended by words but also by sound, images, and bodies. To do fieldwork is indeed to make oneself available to the places and their multiple uses by facing their various temporalities. On foot, by bicycle, by car, by bus, by train, and by airplane, we have surveyed the places of the region in ordinary or unexpected places in order to emerse ourselves in the region’s depth.
- Residencies: Remix Place is an interdisciplinary team. While each team member has done fieldwork on their own, we have favored time in pairs with some collective time in the field. Crossing the border together, testing creative writings or sensory maps, and meeting local artists or everyday experts are all activities we have pursued collectively. Many of these activities occurred during “residencies,” during which we exchanged our practices and engaged in collaborative exercises. Meetings between academics and artists do indeed require specific meeting modalities and it is also in this unconventional format that we have apprehended “the field”.
In the end, we (re)discovered a number of varied places on each side of the border, ranging from “wastelands” to residential housing, from natural sites to commuting places. Our approach tried to keep a certain representativeness of the views on the region by giving the floor to varied genders, people of various geographical and economic origins, children, the elderly, those deeply connected to the territory, and others freshly arrived in the region.
The fieldwork (from the field) is to be understood as a large phase of gathering material from local narratives. Located chronologically at the beginning of the project (May-December 2021), the field is not compartmentalized to a single time of research: it continues to be woven through encounters, through participatory workshops and photographs.
Finally, if the data start from the places of this territory, their will is to return to the place: the analyses created will be restituted in some key places of the region to share the voices, the stories, the maps and the creations resulting from this field. Two major formats of artistic restitution await you in the summer: agora cafés and a documentary play built on the basis of this collective field.
Post authored by Lise Landrin