The Thick Present – Writer’s Residency for Research-Creation in Art & Science
Phœbe Hadjimarkos Clarke
For the residency The Thick Present, Phœbe Hadjimarkos Clarke will undertake a writing project on fires, by weaving various narrative, poetic, political, and theoretical threads – superimposing, opposing, and intertwining them.
The starting point for this exploration is the author’s grandmother, Clara, a fire lookout in the American West during the 1940s and 1950s.
Stationed for several months alone on a mountain peak, she had to monitor the surrounding forest and alert the fire department if a fire started. At the time, the fire prevention measures stated that all fires had to be extinguished by 10 am the next day. Photographs, memories, and textual fragments have survived from this period of Clara’s life, along with a highly literary but very male imaginary: Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, for instance, both worked as fire lookouts and wrote about their time in the service.
Clara’s rejection of conformist and gender norms questions our (gendered) relationship to nature, to fire (from wildfires to domestic hearths), and to their intersection (must all fires be eradicated or must we learn to live with them?). Firewatches and the “zero fire” policy they operated under during the 20th century, although they might seem romantic, in fact allowed organic waste to accumulate, disrupting the area’s ecosystem, and thus strongly contributing to the current situation in the American West, where fire seasons are now year-long, and megafires, which are both a consequence and a cause of global heating, destroy millions of acres, causing long-term air and water pollution.
The Ponderosa and Douglas fir forests in the area in fact evolved alongside low-intensity natural fires, as well as controlled fires lit by Native Americans, which regularly cleansed the forests, helping them thrive and avoiding overly fierce fires.¹ When they are old enough, Ponderosa and Douglas firs can in fact survive the fire that clears the undergrowth.
Therefore, colonial attitudes and the “zero fire” policy they entailed radically disrupted both the ecosystem and a special relationship to the forest characterised by a caring attitude towards living organisms², a disruption that reaches far into the present.
The ambivalent nature of this history, and, more broadly, of fire, will inspire the writing of a novel depicting a series of investigations, whose tentacles will intertwine through pitch-thick time:
· An (auto)biographical investigation: an attempt to reconstruct Clara’s experience as a lookout in relation with the rest of her life, including a period of field investigation in Oregon;
· A scientific investigation: an overview of the current research, in order to understand the dynamics, causes, and consequences of forest fires today, leading to discussions with researchers from the Centre des politiques de la terre. How can we live with fire, an element ubiquitous in our imaginations yet absent from our daily lives, which are paradoxically sustained by fossil fires from deep time, quietly consuming the planet’s resources and liveability?
· A fictional investigation: a final section of the novel recounts the discovery of a secret pyromaniac community, which experiences fire in a utopian, joyful, and radical way – a fire at the heart of life.
By layering facts, times, and fiction, this project seeks to reveal the knottiness of our age – the Pyrocene.³
¹ See the article “Stabilizing influences on future wildfire regimes: Studies in forest burnong and reburning”, Povak, N.A., Hessburg, P.F., Salter, R.B. et al., in Fire Ecology, 2023: https://doi.org/10.1186/s42408-023-00197-0
² See David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Vintage Books, 1997).
³ US historian Stephen Pyne and French philosopher Joëlle Zask have both contributed to popularising the concept of the Pyrocene, the age of fire, which they associate with the Anthropocene and a theorising of “megafires”, fires that no longer accomplish their ecological task and that are the consequence and cause of contemporary global heating. See: Stephen Pyne, The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021); Joëlle Zask, Quand la forêt brûle : Penser la nouvelle catastrophe écologique (Paris: Premier parallèle, 2022).
Phœbe Hadjimarkos Clarke
Phœbe Hadjimarkos Clarke (born in 1987) is a French-American writer and translator. Her novels explore the relationships between humans, non-humans, the environment, and late capitalism. Her first novel, Tabor (Éditions du Sabot, 2021) combined queer anticipation and magical dystopia: Mona and Pauli have survived strange, massive, floods, and live together in Tabor, a rustic and ramshackle new world. In her second novel, Aliène (Éditions du Sous-sol, 2024, and France Inter Book Award winner), she once again questions our political futures. Fauvel, a thirty-something wounded by a rubber bullet during a protest, moves to a small, remote French village to dog-sit a friend’s father’s cloned mutt. In an uncanny, gothic atmosphere, the novel explores anxiety, fear, power relations and the alienating forces of our world. Phœbe Hadjimarkos Clarke also writes poetry (most recently 18 Brum’Hair, Rotolux Press, 2023, co-written with Martin Desinde) and is a translator specialising in the humanities.
“The Thick Present” is a writer’s Residency for Research-Creation in Art & Science developped together with the Centre des Politiques de la Terre and the Culture Department of the Université Paris Cité
Sciences and Writing Practices
Looking at writing practices in the sciences – life, earth, human, social, and health sciences – means focusing on the academic productions of researchers and thus confronting the expression of an epistemological theory with a long legacy: the sciences have a resolutely codified, “neutral” and “formless” practice of writing that aims to guarantee them a certain critical distance and objectivity regarding the facts and conclusions to which they aspire.
While today there are researchers questioning this form of academic writing in the sciences, to the point of asserting a “freer, more original, more judicious, more reflexive way (of writing), not to relax the scientific nature of the research but, on the contrary, to reinforce it”,⁴ it is still common to hear that the latter are “vulgarising” through their new approaches to scientific writing, their research, and sometimes even that they are no longer scientists but essayists.
Writing practices in the sciences are constructed within a radical distanciation with literature, preaching a degree of aridity of form, while other writings cultivate specifically aesthetic and rhetorical strategies, now assimilated with fiction, now with style or tropes.
These rifts within scientific fields deserve to be put back on the loom, with a view to deploying a research-creation in the “arts & sciences”. Writing practices in the sciences and literature rub shoulders with cooperation and the transmission of knowledges, in their encounter with political ecology, understood as a body of thought and commitments that aim to transform modes of inhabiting and relating to the Earth. Swept up in the hot topics of terrestrial upheavals at the heart of our contemporary societies, the sciences fuel contemporary fictions⁵, which, in turn, due to their position of ontological plurality and betterment,⁶ cultivate other possible worlds whose possibilities have yet to be imagined and constructed.
Science and Fiction
Science fiction is a literary genre that cultivates – and creates – out of this interstice of exchange and hybridization between facts, sciences, and fictions. Often described as a form of extrapolation, or even prediction, science fiction works by isolating a tendency or a phenomena of the present time to project it into the future.⁷ Ursula Le Guin compares this procedure to laboratory experiments in toxicology: you administer an isolated molecule to an animal to try to predict how the human body will react over the long term. While everything in science fiction stems from the exploration of realities, it also very often draws on tools of scientific rationality to present surprising but strangely recognisable worlds to us. This is notably the case for so-called “hard” science fiction whose authors (such as David Brin) seek to inscribe their story within a milieu that does not contradict the state of today’s scientific knowledge. Moreover, science fiction cannot be reduced to what could be perceived as the extension of a modernist movement in which, in a future world, the progress in physics and engineering would be deployed through the showcasing of technological innovations (spaceships, lightsabres, teleportation, etc.). To the question How do we imagine our future? science fiction offers a mode of imagination founded specifically on the mobilisation of multiple present times.
“Active past and possible futures in a thick present”⁷: this is one definition of science fiction. The dense present is opaque and, above all, it can only be told as one single story valid for all. With that comes the question How should we tell it? Thinking from the basis of a dense and multiple present means assuming a position: telling a story from a point of view that you must be able to account for.⁹ In other words, “with the blood of whom, of what, have my eyes been shaped?”¹⁰: we are concerned and so are other entities along with us. Positioning ourselves amounts to being capable of actively practising an “ecology of story”¹¹, an ecopoetics¹² firmly rooted in the places and connections of recognition and interdependency. There are science-fiction stories that, by relying on the human and social sciences, relate and describe experiences of intertwinement and cohabitation with alterities. For instance the mutations of sensorialities in interspecies intersections in Octavia E. Butler; the languages of octopi and birds, to which the books of Vinciane Despret initiate us; or the terrestrial and extra-terrestrial love and friendships of Becky Chambers.
These other possible worlds¹³ and ways of interpreting our multiple present that science fiction cultivates resonates powerfully with the themes and frameworks of research in political ecology. By focusing on the effects that these experiences of displacement can give rise to, science fiction finds allies among those researchers working actively to transform societies to better respond to planetary limits. Science fiction also offers political ecology an alternative to the narratives offered by today’s media landscape, whether these are utopian, for instance describing a world in which alliances between renewable energies and nuclear energy would be an enviable alternative to fossil energies¹³, or dystopian, with a world falling into civil war due to the scarcity of natural resources. It specifically enables new thought experiments to be shared that activate different questions and different relationships with our multiple present. These thought experiments consist of bringing tendencies into tension with the way in which technologies and sciences might be reappropriated or subverted, and the degree of velocity with which we want to enter this future is defined by the imagination. Science fiction invites us to imagine our futures via possibilities, to weave new bonds with the sciences and its texts, involving rewritings and new translations. Intervening through stories and fiction to devise the pressure points for transformation means learning to re-anchor ourselves to places, from which to posit their collective reparation by writing profusely. It is a way of broaching the multiple present as potential magnetic force fields, whose possibilities have yet to be invented. A recent current in science fiction notably exists – Hope Punk¹⁵ – which is based on radical social struggles and highlights a dissenting hope.
What can fiction do to science? How can a writing practice inform a research practice? How can science-fiction writing act on the structures of our imaginaries and enable us to outline enviable and breakaway futures? How might the experiments inspired by the visual arts and literature in turn be used to questions the practices of academic writing? What forms and formats can a writer explore with respect to institutional frameworks? These are some of the questions that motivate this writer’s residency held in a public university, at the confluence of science and art research. Because we must also ask ourselves how to put our imaginations to work and that is the subject of this encounter based on our various writing practices.
A Writer’s Residency on Campus
In December 2024, the Centre des Politiques de la Terre, Bétonsalon – centre for art and research – and the Culture Department of the Université Paris Cité are inaugurating a writer’s residency for research-creation, for a seven-month period. The author will be invited to develop a writing project, as well as a programme of workshops and talks, based on intersections between science fiction and political ecology. This residency will take place within the context of Université Paris Cité and will bring students, teachers, and researchers from different disciplines together. After the residency, a public event will be organised so that the author can share their writing project.
For the university, this invitation affords an opportunity to question or even displace the practices of academic writing so that through long-term contact with an author, new forms of knowledge sharing will emerge. In return, the guest author will have access to the research activities – seminars, study days, etc. – of the Centre des Politiques de la Terre or other sectors of the university.
For the art centre, it is a question of offering a framework for research and allowing forms of writing to be explored in contact with other disciplines.
⁴ Ivan Jablonka, L’histoire est une littérature contemporaine. Manifeste pour les sciences sociales, Éditions du Seuil, La librairie du xxie siècle, 2014.
⁵ Isabelle Reigner, “La mutation animale régénère l’imaginaire de la fiction ”, Le Monde, lundi 6 octobre 2014.
⁶ Françoise Lavocat, Fait et fiction. Pour une frontière, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, collection Poétique, 2016.
⁷ Ursula Le Guin, La Main gauche de la nuit, Paris, Le Livre de Poche, 1969.
⁸ Kim Hendrickx , “Science Friction [sic] : le présent est-il transportable ?” (2015), in Habiter le trouble avec Donna Haraway, Éditions Dehors, 2020.
⁹ Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges : The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”, in Feminist Studies, vol. 14, n°3, 1988.
¹⁰ Ibid, in Manifeste cyborg et autres essais. Sciences, Fictions, Féminismes, Paris, Exils, 2007.
¹¹ Jean-Christophe Cavalin, Valet Noir. Vers une écologie du récit, éditions Corti, Biophilia, 2022.
¹² Nathalie Blanc, Denis Chartier, Thomas Pughe, “Littérature & écologie : vers une écopoétique”, Écologie & politique, 36:2, 2008.
¹³ Isabelle Stengers, “Dépaysements”, Stitch & Split: Selves and Territories in Science Fiction, 2004.
¹⁴ Jean-Marc Jancovici, Christophe Blain, Le monde sans fin : Miracle énergétique et dérive climatique, Éditions Dargaud, 2021.
¹⁵ With this in mind, since 2023, author, poet and lecturer Kiyémis has been conducting interviews on Médiapart with artists, researchers and activists approaching their research practices from the prism of “joy”.