The FOR2812 has funded a visiting period of research under Professor John Sutton's supervision intending to explore the connection between episodic memory and our experience of places. Our work together brought up several tiers of philosophical and professional collaboration.

First, we planned to explore the literature on the relationship between memory and places across
related topics, such as affordances, spatial navigation, disorientation, and horizons. To do this, under a previous agreement with Professor Jerome Dokic and Professor Valeria Giardino, I planned and organized a bi-weekly reading group at the Jean Nicod Institute: a centre that could better allow us to reach a wider audience of students and postdocs working on memory and mind.

During the three months spent in Paris, the academic environment of the Jean Nicod Institute was prolific with new ideas, spending the days among talks, colloquia, and the reading group. This latter served not just to brainstorm on the three coordinates of my research: memory, body and environment; but also to create new collaborations with the members of the Jean Nicod Institute. In fact, among the many topics addressed and people participating, the session on the concept of “temporal and spatial disorientation” was particularly fruitful for building new cooperations to investigate the phenomenon of temporal disorientation in episodic memory and self-identity.

The highlight of this productive experience was, however, the last few weeks with the realization of two workshops the “Paris-Bochum Workshop: Memory and Consciousness – Phenomenological and Philosophical Perspectives” on the 15th of May and "Memory, Place and Material Culture" on the 16th and 17th of May. I was the lead organizer of the first workshop hosted at the Jean Nicod Institute. We asked Dorothee Legrand, Michel Bitbol, and Markus Werning, as invited speakers, and received the submitted abstracts of young researchers from both fields: Nikola Andonovski, Giulia Andreini, Nathália De Ávila, and Alfredo Vernazzani. The workshop was a successful opportunity to connect two philosophical perspectives that rarely come into dialogue, especially on memory.

These three months, full of events, travels and collaborations with the two workshops, were an exciting whirlwind of ideas and perspectives, and an opportunity of professional growth.