Faced with the climate crisis, art can carry other visions of the future – Liberation

Attack science, break the thermometer and put the challenge of the century of climate change under the carpet, promote mystical beliefs in technology capacities to solve our problems : These are some of the strategies of an outdated world so as not to build the rest. For the moment power is on the side of these dystopias, technologies and zombie, dead but very alive.

To overthrow this balance of power, it is urgent to carry other stories, other visions of the future. Art, culture, their ability to model our imaginations are privileged fields to invest. But marriage between art and ecology is not self -evident: the free and lavish gesture agrees a priori with the requirement of sobriety and moderation of ecological redirect. If the engagement of many actors is sincere and advanced, the tensions are numerous and cross the artistic field around the changes to be made, from the eco -design of works to professional mobility and to less productivist economic models. Technosolutionist imaginations, collapsologists And those more collective, cooperative and detached from material coexist among artists as in our contemporaries in general.

Bourges 2028, European capital of culture, chooses to favor the artistic gestures that invite us to draw a sustainable and desirable future: Eva Jospin, Pétra Blaisse, Gilles Clément will vegetate the Bourges, Paris-Austerlitz and Blois stations, showing and powerfully experimenting with relations between the living and our human infrastructures.

For the sake of consistency, Bourges 2028 defines a carbon budget not to exceed, online with The trajectory posed by the Paris Agreement. It is a first for a cultural event of this scale. The objective set requires innovating in the method to be able to follow the impacts and make ecologically responsible choices. He also initiates a territory in the diversity of project stakeholders: artists, Bourges 2028 teams, suppliers, restaurateurs, hoteliers, cultural partners, local communities as an organizing mobility authorities.

To hold the ambition, Bourges 2028 will have to create and consolidate alliances with all these actors without whom nothing will be possible. The asset of a European capital of culture is that it attracts all eyes, catalyzing expectations, desires, initiatives and therefore opens up a space for dialogue on the scale of a territory mobilized for its future in the medium term. The account carried by Bourges 2028, the imaginations that the artists chosen will share must be the fuel of the adaptation and the resilience of the territory.

Because yes, the ecological transition is no longer an option but a necessity, whether or not you break the thermometer. Climate change, ecological disturbances make their consequences feel here and now and more and more intense and frequently. The Action Climate network recalled that all regions of France are already affected: in the Center region, it is drought that threatens agricultural yields and a third of animal species, including 50 % of the Batracians. Sologne is twice as much subject to the risk of fire as in the 1980s. The foundations of the Cheronceau castle bathed by the Cher are threatened by The abnormally low levels of the river summer.

Bourges 2028 will be exemplary in its deployment. But it is above all dialogue, the democratic space open around this unifying event that it is a question of grasping to build a joyful projection and anchored in a physical reality which will impose us deeply modified lifestyles.