Dislocare lo sguardo per “pensare come un sedimento”. La rivière et le bulldozer di Matthieu Duperrex

Matthieu Duperrex’s La rivière et le bulldozer (The river and the bulldozer) is part of an inter- and trans-disciplinary “ecopoetic” debate that French ecological activism has been using for several years to give voice to the renewed dialogue between human and non-human – or better said, and taking up Bruno Latour, between vivant and non vivant (living and non living beings) – and to decisively affirm the urgency and the imperative nature of human action with respect to the ecological urgencies that we witness daily. After situating Duperrex’s text within the littératures de l’enquête et du terrain (fieldwork literature) that occupy a large space within the contemporary French literary panorama, the study illustrates the centrality and importance that Duperrex attributes to sediments, to the point of inviting the reader to decentralise his gaze in order to “think like a sediment.” After emphasising the “straniante” value of such an experience, the article stresses, within the debate on the anthropocene, the centrality of the notions of “landscape and sentinel character” and “uncertain landscapes” as the spokesmen of an inescapable urgency to which literature cannot but lend its voice.