E14 - Elena Lucca, “Habitar, Cohabitar, Rehabitar para el Reencantamiento”

Elena Lucca (Argentina)
“Habitar, Cohabitar, Rehabitar para el Reencantamiento” (2025)

The song, the word, the wind, the night, the movement, the sound of the voice, the silence, the calm, other voices dialoguing, a space where everything happens in a musical moment, which recalls “l’ environnement suspended ou l'épochè” by Jean-François Augoyard (1990), the elision, the suspension of perceptual customs, object categorizations and preconceived ideas to listen to what happens in the cohabited space and reinhabit the place as a poetic process of sensitive knowledge. In Resistencia, a city in the Gran Chaco region of South America, during the month of March 2025, the temperature remains constant between 40 and 43 degrees Celsius for 25 days. Plant and animal species, as well as humans, gradually slow their vitality over the course of the days, falling into a kind of lethargy, waiting, in silence, from which we all emerge at the beginning of autumn, with the appearance of gentle rains, a decrease in temperature, and an increase in humidity. Movement and sounds slowly return. In this transition, everything is fluid; evanescent forms begin to define themselves again; receptive identities become permeable to other identities, joyful, celebratory, and eager to dialogue. In the process of re-inhabiting the place, suspense and rebirth emerge in the perception of the countless subtle exchanges and the complexity of the web of relationships within the place. Each event follows its natural course, forming an enveloping whole. A continuous metamorphosis, the cycle of the living, the Tao. The poetics of the world of life thus becomes a Re-enchantment. 

Elena Lucca
is an artist and environmental educator. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Avignon, France, in Space, Time, and Power, Cultural Practices. She has worked as an environmental educator at both Argentine and Italian universities. Since 1990, she has served as a guest lecturer at the CAIRH – Roy Hart International Artistic Center in France. Since the 1960s, Lucca has explored experimental poetic forms, notably through video art presented in various countries. She also organized the Jornadas Internacionales de Poesía (JOPOE) for the National University of the Northeast (UNNE) in Chaco in 1969, and in 1971 co-curated the International Exhibition of Proposals to Be Realized with Edgardo A. Vigo for the CAYC – Center for Art and Communication in Buenos Aires. Drawing on her experiences working in and with forest communities, Lucca has developed an environmental experimental poetic line known as Geopoetry of the Spaces We Inhabit. This work has been featured in exhibitions including: The Re-enchantment (2016), Timeless Spaces: An Ecopolitical Poetics of the Places We Inhabit (2019), The Space We Inhabit: Earth (2021), The Space We Inhabit: Air (2021).