Because how do human live?
2024
The scathing portrait of human beings that Bertolt Brecht paints in his 1928 play The Threepenny Opera remains sadly relevant today: a society of discrimination, closed classes, scheming and hypocrisy, where injustice is present at every level.
Or the rise of the extreme right in Europe, of dictatorships around the world, of Gaza.
So Mrs Peachum would still be right today when she says:
Because what does a human being live on? He who constantly
Robs, harasses, attacks, suffocates and eats his fellow man.
Yes, what holds humans together is that they hasten
To forget that he is still human.
This 37th edition of the Festival invites us to create a place of resistance where we can watch together, a place where we can take the time to see, to compare and to make images appear before our critical eyes.
Faced with the flow of images that create ignorance and oblivion, that feed our fears, the works on display will accompany us, sometimes lightly, often poetically, always with the necessary distance to enable us to activate a reflection, a thought against the tetany and lament.
Some works will take side roads to fight censorship and exist. Despite everything.
Others will be moved away from conventional venues and installed in political and social spaces, such as primary schools, a university, health and social facilities or a restaurant.
The festival will also act as a Museum of Solidarity, hosting the 8th Palestinian biennial /si:n/, which has been forced into exile. In a poetic gesture, the artists have offered their works.
Finally, we will be looking at the new areas of encounter and dialogue between creation and human rights being explored by young artists and content creators from around the Mediterranean who have come to join us.
Along the way, with the electronic poet Michel Jaffrennou, we’ll be going back to the roots of video art, an art form that has emphasised, among other things, playfulness, simplicity, internationalism, inter-media, the ephemeral (performance) and the unity of art and everyday life.
Video art is a hybrid art, and perhaps that’s what it has in common with humans. The human in that it celebrates creolisation (Édouard Glissant) ‘*this process of bringing differences into contact, constantly exchanging and metamorphosing’. Isn’t that what human beings LIVE for? Individuals fully aware of their mutual dependence and interdependence, working towards ‘an archipelagic transformation of humanities’.
(*extract from ‘Le paradigme de l’archipel’, in Archipels Glissant, directed by François Noudelmann, Françoise Simasotchi-Bronès, Yann Toma)