A walk à la Rousseau

A Rousseauist march emerged during the creation of the play Le verrou (a fantasy figure wrongly attributed to Fragonard), which opens with a reconstruction of Fragonard's eponymous painting, painted in the late 1770s. The play leans more towards Sade's rhetoric, but it is Rousseau who guides this walking/writing workshop proposed by Alice Roland with Gaëlle Bourges.

What are our daydreams made of, those moments of "delicious intoxication" so dear to Jean-Jacques Rousseau? To answer this question, we will follow in the footsteps of the author of Reveries of a Solitary Walker, a passionate herbologist who saw writing as a walk and found material for writing in his walks.

First, during an hour-long walk punctuated by sensory experiences offered to walkers, each participant will be invited to explore interior and exterior landscapes and contemplate nature (both outside, created and invented by human hands and eyes, and inside, made up of the sensations and thoughts that walking generates in us). The second part will be devoted to writing: each participant will create the first page of a herbarium of personal impressions, based on what they experienced during the walk—we will give shape to the fruit of a harvest of perceptions rather than plants.

Between the search for precision in description (like a botany of sensations) and surrendering to the "delicious intoxication" of reverie, writing will develop in a "back-and-forth movement from detail to whole and from whole to detail," a dual movement evoked by art historian Daniel Arasse to explain the pleasure we experience when contemplating a landscape.