Semons nos resistances

At a time when crises are multiplying, dominant narratives are locking down our horizons, and the Earth's vital resources are being depleted, it is urgent to come together to build fairer and more sustainable ways of life. It is this immediate, political, and collective necessity that the fifteen artists presented in the exhibition Semons nos résistances explore.

Institutional, economic, and environmental violence reflects ambitions to control, exploit, and exhaust bodies, territories, and imaginations.

At a time when the predatory logic inherent in the neoliberal model and the accompanying hate speech are constantly intensifying, it is essential to firmly reject them. However, opportunities to be heard remain limited when citizens are relegated to the simple role of spectators.

How can we regenerate desires for connection and action when our era produces competition and norms, and fosters withdrawal and harmful affects, starting with anger, resentment, and fear? Where can we find the resources to emerge from the darkness?

Struggles, in what they carry of collectivity, attention to others, joy, and desires for emancipation, seem capable of opening up salvific breaches, allowing light to pass through again, both within oneself and in the structures of the established order.

Even if punctual, minority, or modest, acts of resistance help to rehumanise our presence in the world and the meaning of our interactions.

As they multiply and connect with each other, they can transform into irresistible movements within which knowledge, hopes, and experiences circulate, and where other forms of relationship and cooperation are shared.

While struggle can be about demands and power dynamics, it is also embodied in transgression, in the attention paid to vulnerability, in the recognition of one's own privileges, in the deconstruction of toxic narratives, or in shared and transmitted stories.

Empathy, attention, imagination, and care then become subversive forces, capable of fuelling profound individual, collective, societal, and environmental transformations. It remains to invent the paths, practices, and horizo