Make way...

mardi 17 février 2026
à 13:00
Conversation
Amphithèâtre

For the past few years, Nina Leger has been writing about places. As a guest in the discussion series Fictions: Other Worlds, she will share with us the insights gained from this practice and the questions it raises. She has published two novels centred on places: Antipolis and Mémoires sauvées de l’eau. One tells the story of a city, the other of a river.

In each case:

• the place is at the centre, not as a character but as the very substance of the novel,
• the novel is a means of expressing realities,
• the exploration of these realities leads to the unearthing of buried violence.

Telling stories of constructions led her to speak of destructions and to make room for what had been erased. Places made her question her practice in what seemed to be its most obvious aspects. What does it mean to tell a story? What must a story encompass in order to exist? Can the novel accommodate divergent versions and discordant voices, bringing them together without claiming to reconcile them? These are some of the questions that places pose to those who write about them.

Nina Leger is a novelist. Her latest novels are stories of places. Antipolis (Écrire la Ville Prize) is the tale of a utopia. Mémoires sauvées de l’eau (Historical Novel Prize) follows the course of a Californian river from the gold rush to the mega-fires. This spatial approach to the novel is informed by Nina Leger’s background in art history; she has been teaching the subject at the École des Beaux-Arts in Marseille since 2018. Alongside her literary work, she writes regularly for and with artists.

Series
Presented by architects and lecturers Gwenaëlle d'Aboville and David Enon, the Tuesday Lessons series Fictions: Other Worlds invites participants to listen to writers who construct fictions, much like architects do when designing projects.