Iméra’s Mediterranea MedI-CARE workshop is a creative-research workshop that takes a dissident approach to the Mediterranean, exploring in greater depth our relationship with the living world of the Mediterranean and its representations.
Through the lens of the arts (architecture, cinema, literature, photography, painting), the sciences of all kinds, visual, sensory and gestural scenography, social and migratory history, and visible and invisible heritage, the aim is to reflect on, invent and deploy variations of the Mediterranean, between past and present, in relation to the ecological and environmental challenges of its future, in a context that is both global and local.
Creative research workshop on spatio-temporal dynamics and environmental transitions in the Mediterranean
These moments of exchange and co-creation will bring together artists, civil society stakeholders and interdisciplinary and international researchers (architects, film-makers, anthropologists, oceanographers, historians, scriptwriters, writers, geographers, sociologists, etc.) to explore together what makes the Mediterranean. They will aim to shape the emergence of an individual and collective work in progress that can take shape on the page and on the web, like a logbook that everyone can add to with their entries, to test their working hypotheses, and to navigate in a kind of online museum experimentation that echoes our contemporaneity.
Everyone will not be confined to ‘their’ discipline or area of expertise, which is labelled by convenience as much as by loyalty. Everyone will be free to deploy their heuristic inspiration in all possible directions and develop their own original ideas based on shared materials and archives. The idea is to pay attention to the plurality of points of view and different Mediterranean temporalities, without imposing a linear narrative. Diachronic and utopian frameworks are welcome in the face of environmental emergencies in the Mediterranean. At a time when the Anthropocene is raising ethical and educational questions about climate change and global warming, human actions echo the Greek figure of Icarus, son of the architect Daedalus, who burnt his wings after flying too close to the sun and falling into the sea, and bring us back to our generational responsibilities of ‘care’ for the Mediterranean.
The workshop is intended to become a permanent activity, bringing together artists and scientists, open to Iméra residents at their convenience and at flexible intervals, taking as its focus one or two collective works to be reinterpreted, rethought and hijacked.
2025 Workshop: MedI-CARE
Iméra’s Mediterranea MedI-CARE workshop aims to be a place for reflection, creative emancipation and plural invention around the Mediterranean as a conceptual and concrete laboratory of our planetary future, and will provide voices and paths that are both dissident and inclusive of the future of Mediterranean worlds.
From 9 to 13 June 2025, the third United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC3), organised by France and Costa Rica, will be held in Nice, bringing together Member States and representatives of civil society (scientists, NGOs and companies), The conference will be preceded by the One Ocean Congress on marine sciences, organised by the CNRS and IFREMER, and devoted to a thematic framework ranging from the protection of marine and coastal ecosystems to the decarbonisation of maritime transport, from the fight against plastic pollution to the analysis of the causes of the loss of marine biodiversity.
In our Mediterranean creation-research workshop, we are proposing to take a step aside and take a dissident look at the Mediterranean of 2030, drawing on the Mediterranean of 1930, and to reflect on the ‘other side and the other side’ of the Mediterranean in the light of this UN event, which will see Nice in the global spotlight in June 2025:
- The film À propos de Nice (23min), shot by Jean Vigo and Boris Kaufman at the time of the Nice Carnival in 1930, as part of the ‘Cité Symphonies’ series, and set to music by Marc Perrone, will be used as a basis for thinking about and imagining the Mediterranean.
- The idea is to freely follow the methodology adopted by the artist Sophie Calle in her collective work Prenez soin de vous (Take Care of Yourself), an artistic project as much as a humanistic and therapeutic one, and to take care of the 1930 film according to your own discipline, art and sensibility, by offering your own 21st century take on Vigo-Kaufman’s 1930 commentary on the Bay of Angels.
One of the stated ambitions of the UNOC3 is to ‘implement Sustainable Development Goal 14 (SDG 14) on the marine environment’ in order to conserve and sustainably use the oceans and ‘support the development of a sustainable blue economy’. ‘Conserve, exploit, support”: on the one hand, faced with this melting pot of tryptic intent, Vigo’s socio-political documentary is a constant, almost vertiginous “documented point of view” (Vigo), which “conserves” Nice and participates in its heritage by drawing on its visible and “dissonant” heritage, exploiting its folklore and supporting another, irreverent reading far from the Epinal image which is itself hijacked when it is staged.
Viewed through the prism of the environmental humanities, it allows us to take a more complex look at the issues at stake in the UNOC3: the exploitation of the oceans, the urgency of climate change in the face of social and territorial inequalities, the impact of the sea floor in the face of coastal erosion, and a global analysis of the impact of human agency on the construction and destruction of the Mediterranean coastline and its artistic representations.
On the other hand, the omnipresence of tourism, from popular games to elite leisure pursuits, from migratory contributions to carnival folklore, from intangible heritage to architectural buildings and the call of the horizon, also unites Vigo-Kaufman’s approach and that of our studio. All these faces of Nice, which multiply in the 1930 film under the fluid eye of the camera, offer the mind and imagination heuristic leads and conceptual tools for deciphering the history and meaning of Mediterranean belonging in our hyper-connected societies, mirroring those of 1930. This visual profusion, with its scathing rhythm, cheeky editing and surrealist poetry, forms the basis of a radical vision of Nice, which was already alive under Jean Médecin, Mayor of Nice since 1928. Captured at the turning point of silent cinema, À propos de Nice invites us into a constellation of heuristic possibilities, just like the opening fireworks display.
We invite everyone to give their own interpretation of Vigo-Kaufman’s film À propos de Nice, from the point of view of their own discipline and their own lively questioning in 2025. Let each interpretation be a (re)reading, a re-writing, a strolling extension or an updated projection, in the light of the ‘Mediterranean hour’ of the Nice congress of oceans in June 2025, and allow us to make an evolving (counter-)point from one encounter to the next, in an ocean of possible configurations around the marine and urban environment of the Nice coastline, with the possibility of building bridges with other coastlines on either side of the oceans.