Thirty-One Stories for Thirty-One Different Animal and Plant Species. Voyages en sol incertain by Matthieu Duperrex

Duperrex’s volume Voyages en sol incertain. Enquête dans les deltas du Rhône et du Mississippi (2019) is situated within an inter- and trans-disciplinary ecopoetic debate that French ecological activism has been utilizing for several years to give voice to the renewed dialogue between human and non-human — or better said, following Bruno Latour, between vivant and non-vivant — and to decisively affirm the urgency and non-negotiability of human action in response to the ecological emergencies we witness daily. The book describes two fluvial territories that strongly characterize and represent the South of France and of the United States. The Rhône and Mississippi deltas are indeed the scene of major ecological, historical, industrial, sociological, and political challenges. The study, after highlighting the structure of the book and the intermedial dialogue that the text establishes with the iconographic part, will focus on the mechanisms of the stories, the link they weave with the species to which they are matched, and the consequent multispecies dialogue they advocate, concluding with the concept of sédimentation that Duperrex transforms into a true poetics of nature.