Projects MA FINE ARTS
Symposium 'Eco-monde: horizons nouveaux'
Can we move from one world to another, from one period of human history to another, and still create forms, produce meaning, sell art, as if nothing had happened? To slip into a new era without taking it into account? Between the countdown of the ecological catastrophe and the new environmental conscience, we are in the process of changing paradigm, and of entering, without always knowing it, often backwards, in an unknown universe, where the political, social, scientific, artistic questions are no longer posed in the same terms. Where was the man ("ecce homo") is imposed today the interdependence of the forms of life ("to like the echo?"). Where Prometheus was unleashed, with his myth of progress and his dogma of development, a new concern arises, still badly understood, that of lasting, of letting live, of abstaining. Where substance reigns, that of products, resources, certainties, a new question now insinuates itself: the atmosphere, a matter of ambiance and resonance, of airy spirits and the bewitchment of things. And where anthropocentrism triumphed for a long time, as an imperial posture, the ground is cracking under the feet of Man, who loses his capital letter, his arrogance, his solitude too. Of this obliged ecological turn of the late modernity, the art and the culture cannot not take account. They must find a new tone, in tune with the perils, the urgencies, but also the humility and the breadth of vision required by these new times. They must explore new themes, which frenetic capitalism and the dramas of history had relegated to the background. Above all, they need to think together things that have been separated for centuries: objects and lives, air and meaning, micro and macro, time and space. It is these vast problems that the symposium will address. It is in this spirit that it will shake up our habits. It is with as much joy as questioning, with freedom as with open dialogue, that it will tackle head on the revolution in progress, and its crucial stakes for the art world - and for the simple fact of creating. We will talk about the Anthropocene, green finance, vital decay, militant slush, the relationship between the environment and the extremities, and many other things. Keeping in mind, in order not to disarm, that it is not a question of defending nature, but rather, today more than ever, of being the nature that defends itself.
