Muriel PIC

During my residency, I will produce a poetic history of the Nantes Insitute for Advanced Studies, an invitation to work from archives collected or dreamt about by the institution. The aim will not be to propose a founding narrative, but to start from the principle that archives are there to challenge us, to question the past, present and future through their interaction, and to produce a critical consciousness. As a provisional exergue to my approach, a fable inspired by Toni Morisson, where knowledge is a bird and the institution is a wise, blind old woman to whom visitors ask to test her clairvoyance:
« Is the bird in our hands alive or dead?
- I don’t know, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. »

Muriel Pic is a writer, researcher, film-maker, collagist and occasional translator from German. She lives mainly in Switzerland. She holds a doctorate from the EHESS and is qualified to direct research. She has published around fifteen academic works and taught at several universities. Since 2022, she has devoted herself to writing, poems and documentary accounts, poem-essays and archive montages. Some of her publications include Les désordres de la bibliothèque (Filigranes, 2010), Edith Boissonnas, Henri Michaux, Jean Paulhan, Mescaline 55 (critical edition and presentation, Claire Paulhan éditions, 2014), Walter Benjamin, Lettres sur la littérature (translation with Lukas Bärfuss, critical edition and presentation, Zoé, 2016), Elégies documentaires (Macula, 2016), En regardant le sang des bêtes (33 morceaux, 2017), Affranchissements (Seuil, 2020, Special Mention of the Wepler Prize), L’argument du rêve (Héros-limite, 2022, Micheloud Prize), Dialogues des morts sur l’amour et la jouissance (Héros-limite, 2023), Herbier de prison de Rosa Luxemburg (Héros-Limite, 2023).
Her website: https://murielpic.com


photo by Florian Cella