In this chapter, the author presents some of her creative courses or workshops at Aix-Marseille University and in a local medical centre, as well as a new action research project in creative pedagogy. As a lecturer, she has developed an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and research, infusing her academic teaching with creative, plurilingual practices. She became aware of the pleasures of thinking and writing between languages when studying English poetry for her PhD in French, as well as of the negotiation of the cultural and conceptual mismatches between the discourses of English poetry criticism and French academia, and between interior and exterior languages, but with a crossover effect: a language of intimacy from which one was estranged by distance, a language of exteriority in the immediate environment. The creative energy of language learning, and the pleasure learners take in the phonetics and physicality of foreign words, led the author to develop a pedagogical approach designed to include what Yoann Loisel calls the ‘maternal side of language’. She references Julia Kristeva’s chora to convey the way creative translation and plurilingual creative writing workshops offer the possibility of playing with new ‘ways of [writing]’, new ‘manners of being’.

Completing the trajectory of the book through text, illustration, recitation, architecture, and iconography, this final chapter looks at a case study for the intersection of text, image, and sound in Hagia Sophia. By looking at a sixth-century plaque from the church’s original construction and its afterlife over the centuries, the chapter studies how iconographies develop and change through various uses and contexts of display, and how these shifts alter the resonances with which the reading of the Gospel in the church was understood. The chapter seeks to unsettle our expectations of iconography and how ritual and space intersect with one another.