The movement of people and the fluxes of the world create complex topographies and destabilise the location of our homes. In this practice-based PhD, I explore the shifting sense of home that this manifests. The dramatic transformation of the boundaries of home that demarcates the borders between ‘here’ and ‘there’, “us” and ‘them’ is examined through an autoethnographically informed approach, which takes the researcher’s self as a medium as well as a source of research. Based on personal experience, the changing nature of ‘home’ is studied as it is anchored into the self, adopting an approach that studies the cultural through the personal. In this research, the methods of research are: strategies of observing, attending to the unsettling forces of the unfamiliar, documenting my personal responses on a daily basis, and unpacking some of the existing forms and practices that sustain ideas of belonging and proposing new forms of expression to this unhomely feeling. In this study, the objective is the study of the field (including the dissolving of the ground one is standing on) and the proposing new forms, new visions. This being the case, my methods come from the disciplines of autoethnography and art practice. Throughout my PhD, I aimed to negotiate the different means these two approaches work through their field that challenges the issues of representation, documentation and presentation in cultural inquiry. This thesis explores the transformation of the sense of home and my own sense of belonging based on personal experience. It is also a contribution to the discourse that has flourished between ethnography and contemporary art over the last two decades. The project is situated at the transdisciplinary site between artistic and ethnographic disciplines and reconsiders their mutual interest in the work of cultural inquiry. With a particular focus on the moment that inquiry meets its public, I explored other possibilities of “graphy” (writing) that conventionally translates as a descriptive, textual representation in ethnography. I strived to suggest alternative forms through the ways artistic inquiry work on its field that takes this moment of encounter as a crucial part of its process. Thus, the thesis is an account of these negotiations that complements the experiments in my art practice, through which I have explored the dialogue between the two distinctive approaches to inquiry.

À travers l’étude d’une cinquantaine de pièces, textes et spectacles, issues du répertoire européen contemporain, il s’agit d’envisager la représentation dramatique comme un fait anthropologique, mettant en jeu des pratiques du signe et de l’interprétation, à travers le prisme de l’enquête – entendue comme processus de création, comme forme structurante mais aussi comme mode de relation au monde et au spectateur. Parcours des hypothèses, laboratoire des fonctions cognitives et heuristiques de la représentation, il apparaît que l’enquête désigne ce trouble par lequel le théâtre se pense comme représentant quelque chose. Cette thèse inscrit donc les dramaturgies contemporaines à l’intérieur du paradigme indiciaire, identifié par C. Ginzburg, en regard des formes romanesques de l’enquête (roman naturaliste et policier). Elle entend ainsi réparer le déficit théorique dont souffre cette fiction maîtresse » (D. Kalifa), permettant ainsi de penser les significations de la reprise d’une démarche moderne, attachée à la recherche d’un sens et d’une lisibilité, dans une période marquée par le postmodernisme, caractérisée par une posture de relativisme et de suspens herméneutique. Le recours aux scènes du procès, de la reconstitution, de l’interrogatoire, étudié dans une seconde partie, découvre des opérations critiques et réflexives où les dispositifs de production du vrai sont interrogés comme autant de politiques et de poétiques du signe. Quant à l’écriture documentaire, qui fait l’objet d’une troisième partie, elle apparaît comme traversée par trois orientations distinctes – thétique, constatative et interrogative – que nous identifions à partir de leur rapport à l’enquête. / Through the analysis of about fifty plays, texts, and performances from the contemporary European repertoire, this study will consider dramatic representation as an anthropological fact involving practices of signs and interpretation, through the prism of the investigation – understood as a creation process, a structuring form but also a way of relating to the world and the spectator. A path of hypotheses and a laboratory of the cognitive and heuristic functions of representation, it appears that the investigation refers to this confusion through which theatre is thought to represent something. This dissertation therefore inscribes contemporary dramaturgies within the clue paradigm, coined by C. Ginzburg, in relation to novelistic forms of the investigation (naturalistic and detective novels). Thus it intends to repair the theoretical deficit plaguing this “master fiction” (D. Kalifa), opening a reflection on the meanings of reusing a modern approach, tied to the search for meaning and legibility in a time marked by postmodernism and characterized by an attitude of relativism and hermeneutic suspense. The use of scenes of trial, reconstitution, and questioning, studied in the second part, uncovers critical and reflexive operations in which the devices of truth production are questioned as politics and poetics of the sign. As for documentary writing – the focus of the third part, it appears crossed by three distinct orientations – assertive, constatative and interrogative – which will be identified according to their relations to the investigation.