In October 2024, three French scholar-artists including Cornell's Laurent Dubreuil reenacted Odysseus' epic voyage, but in North America. Traveling by car, train, airplane, bus, boat and foot from Troy Hills, NJ to Ithaca, NY, they collected tree leaves and took photographs as they went. They also recorded excerpts of the Greek poem, made drawings and performed rituals at sites along the way.
An exhibition of the work they created on their "Odyssea Americana" opens Sept. 4, 6 - 8 p.m. at The Soil Factory, 142 Ithaca Beer Dr. in Ithaca. A talk between the exhibit curators and artists will begin at 6:30 p.m. The event is organized by The Soil Factory (which is led by Johannes Lehmann, the Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences) and The Humanities Lab at Cornell. The trip and exhibit are co-sponsored by the French Studies Program in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) and the A&S Rural Humanities Project.
"In this exhibition, we tried to recreate the conflation of the mythical past and the prosaic present we experienced during the journey," said Dubreuil, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences, Director of The Humanities Lab and professor of French, francophone and comparative literature (A&S). "Prints of digital photographs will be next to handwritten excerpts of Homer's poem. To the sound of the Greek text, different site installations, both indoor and outdoor, will also allow visitors to appropriate elements of the epic adventures, including, for instance, hiding under a sheep skin, as Odysseus when he escapes from the Cyclops' cave."
Read the full story on the College of Arts and Sciences website.
