Institutional, economic and environmental violence embodies ambitions of control, exploitation and the exhaustion of bodies, territories and imaginations. At a time when the predatory logics of the neoliberal model and the hateful discourses that accompany them continue to intensify, it is essential to oppose them with a firm refusal. Yet the possibilities for being heard remain limited when citizens are relegated to the mere role of spectators.
How can we regenerate the desire for connection and action when our era produces competition and norms, and fosters withdrawal into oneself and harmful emotions, starting with anger, resentment and fear? Where can we find the resources to get out of the night? Struggles, in what they carry of collectivity, attention to others, joy and the desire for emancipation, seem able to open saving breaches that let light pass once again, both within ourselves and within the structures of the established order. Even when occasional, minority or modest, resistant gestures help to rehumanise our presence in the world and the meaning of our interactions. As they multiply and connect with one another, they can turn into irresistible movements within which knowledge, hopes and experiences circulate, and where other forms of relation and cooperation are shared.
If struggle can take the form of demand and power relations, it also takes shape in transgression, in the attention we pay to vulnerability, in the recognition of our 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. What remains is to invent the paths, practices and horizons to begin this collective rebirth.
Through the presentation of the work of fifteen artists, the exhibition Semons nos résistances celebrates these actions that sow the seeds of a joyful dissidence in the service of other ways of inhabiting the Earth, attentive to the living and to otherness. Even more, it is an invitation to gather in order to invent, together, the world we wish to see come about.