Work-in-progress: 9 minutes excerpt filmed in Mount Tianzhu

Work-in-progress: 1 min 45 excerpt filmed in Mount Daji

Genesis of a collaboration

A last minute addition to our team of participants to the field survey, photographer and filmmaker Marie-Françoise Plissart has been collaborating with Lia Wei and Zhang Qiang since 2010. At the time, she travelled to the rock-cut tombs of Sichuan and the Buddhist engraved sutras of Shandong with us, with anthropologist and sinologist Françoise Lauwaert, and later produced two short films, one on contemporary calligraphy and the other one on the rock carved texts and spaces. The latter, – entitled “La pierre et le pinceau” – documented the process of rubbing reliefs and inscriptions, following Lia and Zhang Qiang across cliffs and caves. This 20 min film was shown at the occasion of several exhibitions by the itinerant “Lithic Impressions” project, the last occasion in date being the March 2023 exhibit “Pratique de l’estampage” at Inalco/EFEO/BULAC. Inviting Marie-Françoise to join us more than ten years later for yet another trip to the engraved cliffs of Shandong is a way to continue, over time and across generations, the dialogue on how and why we travel to inscribed landscape, relate to inscriptions in the landscape, and record, document or study them…, a way to, in Tchou-Tchou’s words, “Apprivoiser l’épigraphie”.

Marie-Françoise’s eye is precious to us, because it coïncides with the project’s research orientation, especially with our attempts at describing calligraphy as a visual phenomenon indissociable from its context, and with the special attention we devote to the different agents who read and inscribe the landscape over time. With her inclination for visual narratives since her very first roman photo – Droits de regard -, through her many collaborations with anthropologists and art historians around various themes with a peculiar sensibility for architecture and the environment – to cite only but a few: Michelangelo’s quarries, the renovation of Atomium, her collaboration with Sophie Bruneau about Cézanne and the Sainte-Victoire mountain, her seas and trees series, etc -. She travelled to China extensively since the 1970s, without proposing a project exclusively focused on this area or culture. Lately, she explored the relationship between seal carving, calligraphy, painting and printing in a duo exhibit with Lia Wei. She was just the outsider eye we needed, but with a certain degree of complicity.

Before and after the field

In preparation for this trip, she met with our team of interns while in Brussels, and started to take notes and draw sketches about this group of young scholars. Headed to inscribed mountains they had studied for about a year, without setting foot on them… How would their relationship to epigraphy evolve over the trip, and after? Ahead of this trip, Tchou-Tchou Tophoven had started to follow a training in video editing, and looked at the images taken in Sichuan and Shandong back in 2010-2011, to familiarize with Marie-Françoise’s previous work on related topics. It is not excluded that some images taken back in the years are used to construct a narrative on the long term, in the final film project. During the field trip and during the post-processing phase, Tchou-Tchou will be the one to centralize and digest the audiovisual material, and our main interlocutor in the construction of the film’s narrative.

When on the field, Marie-Françoise was always the first to climb up the mountain and the last to come down. Her work on the field would not have been possible without the help of Zhangyue Hanwen, a MA student from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute who assisted her in carrying and securing the photographic and sound recording material while in the mountains, and Tchou-Tchou, a MA student from Inalco and Altergraphy intern who contributed to sound recordings, helped in communicating with the Chinese speaking environment and, more importantly, constantly was able to rephrase the project’s research questions in relationship to the camera’s needs, limits and possibilities.

Back to Brussels, with only three weeks’ time before the planned exhibition and conference, Marie-Françoise, Tchou-Tchou and Lia were only able to watch and select part of the material. They ended up constructing a 9 minutes short extract on Tianzhushan, and a 1.5 minutes trailer on Dajishan. In this first phase, the trio has privileged images that stage the mountain – its shape and paths, the conditions when climbing it, the alterations it underwent in the heritigization process with the addition of cages and pavilions -, and our effort to embrace its scale and the materiality of the inscriptions – to touch, rub, measure, photograph and scan the engraved surfaces. Both extracts will be shown and projected as works-in-progress during our conference and exhibition, and as soon as the image and sound editing will be satisfactory, they will be available online.

Videographic forays into the Epiverse

In the following months – with a final deadline set at the end of the project in September 2028, we will viewing, selecting and cutting the rest of the material – including the untouched shots of Yunfengshan and Linglongshan – to construct a narrative that includes all four mountains. Tchou-Tchou Tophoven, in her second year of master at Inalco, will keep a diary of the process and to keep track of the evolving narrative. We will think of ways to annotate this audiovisual narrative in parallel to the planned annotation of images and 3D models, and with the final publication of our online corpus in mind. Progressing step by step, mountain by mountain, the qualities and issues raised by the image and sound recordings will shape our choices. The interview material, for example, and the voice recordings of our observations on the field are left for this later phase of post-processing. We still need to integrate a great number of scenes that show the deep contradictions between the contemporary managing of the sites, the people who inhabit these mountains today, and the occasional visitors or tourists, who can be invasive in numbers, loud, and intrude in various way in our recording process.

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