Four poets and an electronic music composer flank a lecturer on the right. Their concern? Not to miss the exit that connects the “mechanical locomotion” highway to poetry—that county road with its often poorly maintained pavement.

What? Excuse me? Pour four poems into the asphalt? Well, yes! From sound experiments to verbal fuel mixtures, a few alternative routes open up to us, allowing us to reconcile travel with courtesy.

Feminist Formula 1, sentimental engines, an ambiguous auto chronicle, “ambisonic” commutes on public transit—we’ll put the poem into gear to soften the garage of the future.

Following up on his performance-based lecture “Mot à moteur,” presented last fall as part of the Péritopies series , Pierre Thévenin builds an unexpected bridge between mechanical engineering and artistic creation, spanning music, the visual arts, and poetry.

Drawing on a unique body of work (ranging from a duet for a wind turbine and saxophone to a concerto for twelve tractors), he humorously examines the role of infrastructure in culture, juxtaposing the futuristic imagination that fuels our desire for innovation with concerns about feminism and ecology.

As an exercise in research and curation, the “poésie sans plomb” evening brings together five guests who explore mechanical locomotion from complementary perspectives.

Poet Michèle Métail will present Pole Position, a fragment of her Infinite Poem: a collection of nouns (currently nearly 30,000 lines), whose genesis is partly linked to the Danube steamboat company.

Elsa Boyer will read an excerpt from Grip (MF Éditions, 2023), a novel centered on the grip between the wheels and the track, but also between the mathematical models of racing and the bodies of three female F1 drivers.

Author Antoine Dufeu will present Autocudi x Catalogue, a long-term project centered on “an automotive saga” that he invites readers of Caradisiac to help write by posting comments on his automotive columns (Blancs, CNEAI, 2014).

Finally, composer Vincent Laubeuf and poet Théo Robine-Langlois will premiere Noroît Noret Sudet Sudoît, a poem about cars and the wind, in an Ambisonic sound installation by Sylvain Cadars, in partnership with Ircam.