12th IAWIS/AIERTI International Congress: Water and the sea in texts and images

4 - 9 July 2021 University of Luxembourg, Belval campus

At a time when water scarcity is looming and the continent is affected even at the very bottom of its epicentre by what is happening on its shores, it seemed urgent to us to propose this subject, which is both imaginative and highly topical.

In Alessandro Baricco's novel Ocean Sea (1993), the fictional painter Plasson paints the sea with... sea water. This emblematic scene sums up our theme in a way: water is a difficult element to define and yet it concerns us more and more. It is still waiting to be defined, or even resists any effort to conceptualize it. The discourse and imagery of water and the sea are not self-evident, are a real discursive and plastic challenge and are therefore particularly likely to call into question the relationship between text and image. By its "unbounded" rhythm (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980), the aquatic element transcends the discrepancy between the arts of time and the arts of space introduced by Lessing (cf. Louvel, 2002).

The unspeakable of water is not its invisible. And yet, literary or plastic investments (water stories...) form a real semioosphere with, on its periphery, a zone of "violation of semiotic links" (Lotman, 1966), the reign of the unstable, the arbitrary, the inexplicable.

Luxembourg, a country at the centre of the European continent - although we know how well the centre is doing if the periphery is healthy -, home to the Melusine mermaid, a territory that boasts natural springs and thermal baths, seems to us to be the appropriate place to host a world congress on this subject.