[ “Manifeste” — unPublic #80 — PARIS, 25 FEBRUARY 2022 ]
Much of past century’s artistic avant-garde bloomed on the ruins of war, denouncing our civilisation’s diabolically destructive ways and rejecting the heritage of culture and tradition that made such contorted bloodiness come about: for all human history basically is but a continuing sequence of stories of the few exploiting and extorting the many. Being cruelly, profoundly inhuman while selfishly driven by greed for power and wealth, unfortunately, has proven to be an all too universal human trait.
History did not end.
It just took a turn for the worse.
At least since the days of our first modern world war (a little more than a hundred years ago), artistic avant-gardes longed, yearned and reached for the magic that would allow brewing a potion to re-invent mankind. A cleansing, a cutting of umbilical cords with our cultural pasts; a means for erecting a different-from-the-classical art, a carving out of virginal (or less tainted at least) paths into next futures.
Idle dreams, idle promises, promises. Artistic speculation never did and never will put an end to human madness. Probably that is a something only ‘nature’ can and will do. Some day. Meanwhile though, it did and does give us a number of interesting and entertaining ideas to pick up, to reflect upon, to spread and to enjoy, inter bella.
It was — par hasard — a mere day after the (already longish looming, but still sort of shockingly sudden) onset of a new War of Worlds, on Friday February 25th, that Marc Plas, Claude Parle, Arno Bisselbach, Léonore Boulanger, Julie Coutureau, Adèle Beaulieu, Gersande Schellinx, Rébus and I, gathered in the Espace Vitet (kindly put at our disposal by France Vitet) in the rue Pelleport in the 20th arrondissement for the 80th in our series of speculative unPublic events.
This particular unPublic event was intended to be largely voice-based, and inspired by a book that Magister Rébus picked up last summer in the book box in the small park next to La Générale, facing the 14th arrondissement’s town hall: a copy of…
