Drawing, Place and Memory

T.-B. Kenniff & C. Lévesque. Communication donnée dans le cadre du colloque The Place of Memory and the Memory of Place, Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, Londres / En ligne, 21-22 juin 2025.

Drawing place is an engagement with the world, a commitment to understanding what is, what was, what could have been and what could be. In drawing place, we engage with memory on multiple levels: 1) in the keen and thoughtful observation of what surrounds us, its commitment to memory; 2) in giving form to what emerges between imagination and recollection; or 3) by the multiple ways in which drawing intertwines with the experience of place. This presentation is based on two publications, one from 2024 and another to be published in 2026. The two books gather an international cast of contemporary artists, designers and researchers. In them, we analyze how different themes, including time, site, scale, materiality and narrative, relate to the idea of place and to the practice of drawing. What emerges from our reflection, with relation to the theme of the conference, is that drawing creates and produces an imaginary that seeps between us and reality, one that can sharpen, deform, multiply and refract the memory of place. In doing so, drawing can be understood in two related ways. 1) The artefact ‘drawing’ is a memory place (le dessin est un lieu de mémoire). And 2) The practice of drawing is a way of working at memory (dessiner est une pratique de la mémoire). Using drawings from the publications, we discuss three ways in which these two propositions operate: drawing as document and documentation; drawing as investigation and invention; and drawing time, scale and materiality.

Badlands, Sara Schneckloth

Adjective Construction, MOTE