[Música] I invite you to continue our reflection on mediations. No longer with the video letter but this time with another experience: reflexive drawing. Between 2005 and 2010 I proposed to dozens of international students enrolled at the University of Cergy-Pontoise to make drawings in response to the instruction "Draw your course and your international mobility project. Explain your drawing" I have selected some of these drawings for you. You will look at them to understand how some students rather visualize their current mobility in relation to their experience in the past or visualize their present mobility in relation to a project in the future and how they all represent their own reflexivity as an actor that can stand the test of mobility. Let's look at the drawings of Ana and Catia: they represent student mobility as an experience that takes place in an already there, a series of choices, a "way of life", even, a program. I will make three remarks: First, Ana emphasizes in her drawing the importance of situating the moment of her mobility as part of an ascending continuum, without breaking the steps of a graduated sociality. When she comes to France, Ana seems to fulfill a destiny whose meaning she does not question. For Catia, it's a little different: the rise of his little character requires a great physical and mental effort punctuated with questions. Second, the intercultural experience is not mentioned in Ana’s drawing. On the other hand, for Catia Erasmus mobility introduces in its future the possibility of making a choice between Portugal and France. Third, in mobility, the two students implement a reflexivity and express an uncertainty or a worry about their future. Indeed, Ana represents the post-mobility stage by a question mark which can be interpreted as an uncertainty Catia first indicates an opposition between her country of origin (Portugal) and her host country (France), then discovers that the difficulties that frightened her existed only in her imagination! Now let's look at Marina's drawing It is part of a set of drawings that show the effort made by the student to include its experience and its project in the Tout-monde. In these drawings, students visualize more the projective than the retrospective dimension of mobility. The effort made to master mobility dynamics leaves less room for doubt or worry about the future. Thus Marina places a young girl, well settled on both her legs, in big shoes posed at the top of a globe traced like a simple circle, with 5 possible ways under her feet and above her head two bubbles with two question marks. Marina explains this overhang position to us in the following way: “Being above does not mean that I am the queen of the earth! It means that I have a distance from other countries and my homeland. I can see differently and discover other countries. I represent a person with the nose, the mouth, the ears: it is important to possess the senses. I can see, hear, feel and touch That makes it easier for me to discover the world. I drew very large feet and shoes to always go further, perhaps further from my country, from my mentality to overcome my bad habits, all that prevents me from knowing others.” In this drawing, the journey is international, and the emphasis is on a displacement at the same time real and imaginary in relation to an origin. The relationship with the international dimension is dynamic, open, and in continuity with national belonging. Marina explains to us: “The meaning of my drawing is that it presents my international mobility. If I'm self-sufficient and free, I can go wherever I want. A journey in the proper sense but also the intellectual journey that I made since my childhood to discover otherness/alterity and enrich myself. The globe is circular... as we know, history, the world represents a circularity, plus the circular movement of my life because when I was a child I imagined trips, other cultures. Now I am here with my childhood dream: the dream of getting to know many things.” Let's now study Maria's drawing: it belongs to a particularly expressive set of drawings that represent student mobility as a creative experience of change: it opens a gap, creates an existential dynamic, even a mutation of the subject, a passage and perhaps a turning point on its life. The reflexivity acquired in mobility is not connected to worry about the future. Maria explains her drawing: “It's a train in a tunnel towards the light. The tunnel is going from one state to another, it's a way of moving from one world to another. I see myself traveling with my parents, then all alone. Every time I leave, I go to another world, a new world. The train is the first means of transport that I took alone: on an adventure. I have been binded to it ever since I was a child, it has always been the means to realize my dreams, it is the way that the tale characters (that I invented) traveled, with the wheels and the smoke. This is the dream” In conclusion, for these students, international travel is an experience that will make them more autonomous. Whether the world is seen as a challenge or a point of support, they seem ready to confront it, making efforts to register their mobility in coherence with their already acquired social trajectories (like Ana and Catia) and with their ideals, their hopes and their dreams (like Marina and Maria). The two visual narration practices we have seen (video and drawings) help to raise awareness and conduct the internal and external identity negotiations that are necessary for us to live our hybridization. As Marina says, explaining her drawing: “I draw otherness, another culture, another language, people from all over the world. I can now meet someone very interesting who comes from far away, who is different from me” [Music] [Music]
