Laurent Derobert is a French conceptual and performing artist splitting his time between Avignon and Paris. One of Derobert’s recent initiatives is based on Odysseus’ journey and the vegetal world. In collaboration with Laurent Dubreuil who authored in parallel a book on botany in Homer’s epos (Botaniser l’Odyssée; Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2024), Derobert collected on site, in the Mediterranean, the seeds of each plant mentioned in the poem, and he designed a series of performance “rituals” and “restitutions.”
Taking advantage of the symbolic naming of East Coast locales in relation to the classical world, and thanks to the grant awarded by the Rural Humanities initiative, Derobert and Dubreuil, together with skipper and visual artist Gaïa Bergelin, conducted in October 2024 another re-enactment of the Mediterranean journey, leading this time again from Troy to Ithaca, but in the United States. Owing to the American mythology of the road trip, this odyssey was mostly done with a car, also relying on other modes of transportation. Instead of collecting seeds, we gleaned pictures and sounds (as well as a few tree leaves), the focus being on the germination of the symbolic and the metaphorical exploration of the land. Most of the time was spent in rural areas, especially in New York State, Pennsylvania, and, to a lesser extent, Ontario. Several performances were conducted: a nekuia in the countryside; more than 30 readings of the Greek original text by Dubreuil and collaborators; and two public lectures-performances, one at the University of Chicago, the other at Cornell University.
A multimedia exhibition should take place in late 2024-early 2025 at Hus Art Gallery in Paris. A different show will be presented in Ithaca, NY in 2025. Some images and sounds will later be made freely available on the Cornell Humanities Lab website. Co-sponsors include the French Studies Program and the Humanities Lab (at Cornell), as well as Hus Art Gallery in Paris.
Actual journey:
- Troy: Troy Hills, NJ
- Kikones: Keystone restaurant in Scranton, PA
- Land of the Lotus Eaters: Pittsburgh, PA
- The Cyclops’ Cave: the former mental asylum in Buffalo, NY
- Aeolus’ Island: Allegany State Park, NY
- Laestrygonian land: Mountsberg Conservation Area, ON
- Circe’s: Toronto, ON
- Nekuia at the end of the world: Virgil Dam, ON
- Charybdis and Scylla: The Niagara Falls
- The Island of the Sun: Presque Isle Beach, PA
- Calypso’s: Chicago, IL
- Phaeacian land: Rochester, NY
- Ithaca: Ithaca, NY.