Geography
Felix de Montety, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Sciences Po Grenoble, PACTE, 38000 Grenoble, France
My research focuses on the epistemology and modern history of geography in Europe, Turkey and Central Asia. I am particularly interested in linguistic issues and translation, as well as in the contribution of narrative, visual, sensory, and non-representational approaches to contemporary geography.
I think that multiplying scales, angles, and ways of apprehending the notion of space is the essential part of what I do in my research, and contributes to structure both the way I work and the way I perceive the World on a daily basis, when discovering a place, a landscape, a performance, or a form. I do not know whether this is the sign of an occupational distortion or of a quirk that has become my profession, because there is something in the notion of space that fundamentally defines the geographical approach and at the same time that must be shared with other scholarly and creative practices.
Study of concept’s multiple linkages – between space and territory; space and landscape; space and identity; or even space and mapping – shows us to what extent it is constructed, negotiated. Space exists because it is experienced. In my current work, I take up this perspective to explore the idea of a “space of languages,” that is to say both the way in which languages vary and circulate – how they are continually fixed, mixed and redefined – according to the spaces where they are practiced, and the way in which language is used to construct space, to explore the World in order to say “I am here, I’m going there, I know and belong to this here and that there.” It is certainly possible to draw up geographies of the spatial variation and diversity of languages – to spatially analyze for instance toponyms, accents, loanwords, and hybridizations. It is from this perspective that I am trying to initiate, in collaboration with linguists, hybrid methodological approaches that allow us to question the way in which humans put language at play within space in order to identify themselves, to appropriate what surrounds them – both close and far-off – and to challenge themselves individually and collectively.
Fieldwork continually changes the relationship that we might have to the concept of space, because while it is a central notion for the human sciences, it is also an extremely present term in common language. When we conduct field research in human geography, we naturally come into the work with our own space as professionals obsessed with the concept of space. But we are then confronted with other uses of this same word, and other conceptions of what space signifies in other people’s lives, other representations, other ways of building up individual worlds. In this respect, space is not necessarily the extremely broad and encompassing notion that we would want in vain immodesty to try and define. Rather, it is a mirror that we can hold up to both the world and to ourselves, moving us to reflect on the ways in which it is possible for us to move about in space, to exert action on our surroundings, to better understand the World that we will come to know, step by step.
Cite this item: Felix de Montety, “Space”, translated by Caroline Schlenker, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2022, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177559
