We are pleased to invite you to the first arpentage of the new artistic cycle at La Criée, Festina Lente. Arpentage is a method of collective reading. A book is divided into as many parts as there are participants. After individual reading, members share and summarize their reading. La Criée's team invites you to discover À l’est des rêves by Nastassja Martin, published in 2022 by Éditions La Découverte.
Known to the public for her work Croire aux fauves, anthropologist and writer Nastassja Martin crossed the Bering Strait to conduct research in Kamchatka. During the Soviet era, the Even people, nomadic reindeer herders, were settled into collective farms.
In 1989, just before the fall of the Soviet Union, an Even family is said to have decided to return to the forest, recreating an autonomous way of life based on hunting, fishing, and gathering. Was this a legend? How did a small collective, violated, dispossessed, enslaved by colonizers before being forgotten by history, seize the systemic crisis to regain its autonomy?
In this book, where performative dreams and mythical stories respond to assimilation policies and ecosystem disruptions, the author brings colonial history and indigenous cosmologies into dialogue, restoring power to the multiple voices that give the world its vitality. (source: Éditions La Découverte)