Making a Festival<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n We believe that a festival, like an artist, cannot stand apart from the world.<\/strong> Today, our responsibility is all the greater, in a world that\u00a0flattens and clouds our vision, points to enemies, and erodes the spaces where we can come together to speak and listen.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n All the more so in the face of what is unfolding before our eyes in Gaza<\/strong>:\u00a0a genocide, accompanied by a war over narratives and images, in which looking, showing, bearing witness, and making Palestinian voices heard are also political acts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And we cannot pretend that culture exists in some sheltered place, untouched by all this. Everywhere, cultural spaces are growing more fragile, resources are shrinking, venues are closing or being forced to give up, and artists, along with those who work alongside them, are navigating ever more precarious conditions.To defend culture is also\u00a0to defend the spaces where a society can still come together, think, doubt, challenge one another, and imagine what might be possible.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It is within this context that we make a festival. This year again, we wanted the festival to take different shapes and inhabit several spaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Opening the festival in two\u00a0ephemeral\u00a0popular galleries<\/strong>, with ADPEI and Espoir Provence, is a way of seeking another form of social proximity, of bringing art into places where it is not always expected, and of making the encounter with artworks an encounter with others. And because images know no borders, the works will continue their journey to Algeria, Italy, Iran, Morocco and Palestine<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Making a festival is also this:\u00a0setting images in motion, but also stories, perspectives, and imaginaries. Setting in motion what might otherwise remain apart. Making a festival today may be, perhaps, a way of defending a necessity: the necessity of a conversation that is neither consensus nor war.\u00a0A conversation that keeps open the possibility of a common world.<\/strong>\u00a0Because where authoritarianism would have us see enemies,\u00a0we still want interlocutors.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 39th edition<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":16977,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[645,647,616,586],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-at-la-friche-2026","category-escapes-to-2026","category-program2026","category-home"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.instantsvideo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.instantsvideo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.instantsvideo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.instantsvideo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.instantsvideo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17177"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.instantsvideo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17300,"href":"https:\/\/www.instantsvideo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17177\/revisions\/17300"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.instantsvideo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.instantsvideo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.instantsvideo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.instantsvideo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
It is entangled in it. It is permeated by it. It bears its contradictions, its violence, its hopes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So how can the very form of a festival become a political response?
How can we invent other forms of conversation, other ways of coming together, of listening to one another, of engaging with one another?
We ask ourselves these questions from the place we inhabit, and from what we have been doing for a long time:\u00a0circulating images, shifting places, creating encounters, imagining spaces of hospitality.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
At Friche la Belle de Mai, we are offering\u00a0four days of immersion<\/strong>\u00a0through screenings, electronic poetry and performances, within this setting of conviviality and hospitality that is so dear to us.<\/em>
We have chosen to entrust the opening of these encounters to the video art biennial\u00a0\/si:n\/<\/strong>, to make visible and audible a\u00a0living, resilient, standing Palestine.
A collective Mediterranean exhibition will invite us to recognize, behind every image, a human presence \u2014 political, irreducible:\u00a0What we see looks back at us.<\/em>
Then, for its final stop in Marseille, the festival will take up residence with our friends at\u00a0Vid\u00e9odrome 2<\/strong>, because we love this local cinema, which operates on a pay-what-you-can basis and champions everyday access to film, with a demanding and eclectic programme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The festival will foreground the artistic practices of 97 artists <\/strong>who approach the image not only as a means of representation, but also as\u00a0a site of inquiry, rupture and reconfiguration<\/strong>. Their video and performative gestures unfold as sensitive,\u00a0poelitical<\/em>\u00a0and critical acts.
They offer us this fragile opportunity to remain in conversation,\u00a0to look together without looking in the same way, to listen without immediately seeking to respond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n