Description

The 33rd edition of the Festival Les Instants Vidéo will start in November 2020 (exhibition, screenings, performances…) in Marseille, Friche la Belle de Mai and in other spaces in the city. As usual, the festival will also take place in other cities in France and abroad. For each of the spaces, a specific program will be display.
The following call presents some of the issues our team is dealing with at the moment. It is not a theme. Artists may or may not take it into account.

The beauty of a boundless (éperdu) gesture
(a call dedicated to Annie Le Brun who helps us understand the deep beauty of the word éperdu)

The world became uglier. Wars with widespread of ruins and dead bodies, skyrocketing poverty, forests and oceans harmed, this is nothing new.
The unprecedented ugliness is the result of a much more violent epidemic than plague was: the commodification of the nearly entire world. An attack on everything from which (economic) value can’t be gain, a war against passion and unreasonable life. A war against the desire and the bodies without which to think is not possible.
If for long art was an exception to the rule, innumerable art forms being dwelt with an indomitable desire, today its so called “contemporary” form is more and more difficult to distinguish from the pseudo-aesthetics that our eyes and ears suffer with the pervasiveness of commodity. Our bodies, our cities and our contemporary art museums, every where in the world, exhibit the same objects, the same images, the same brands, the same signs, making our planet a huge childish leisure park or a huge shopping center worthy of an airport.
Instead of dwelling the world poetically, we are in transit, dead men on leave, consumable and disposable items. We live in a market-positivity empire where objection, struggle, friction, conflict must be banned. But, as William Morris tells us, ugliness is not flat, it acts upon man and deteriorates his sensitivity, so that he will not even feel the degradation, which prepares him to descend a step.
Thinking doesn’t lie outside the globalisation of mediocrity. It abjectly suits to our emptinessconsumption era. The consequences are truly terrifying. Bodies are the first to suffer, petrified in the icy waters of egotistical calculation, they lie mutilated, reduced to their smallest market value, their capacity to generate profit. They have only one freedom left, to obey. One horizon, to get used to ugliness.
In the eye of the economic terror storm, which is the worst climate disaster, COME OUT the meteorologists of desire in places where we do not expect them. These are the ferocious poets, the women and men which dimension is up to their excess, and whose irrepressible gesture, in trying to liberate imagination with a long, boundless and reasoned disordering of all the senses, to follow Rimbaud, frees us from centuries of domestication and insane resignation. This gesture lead us to a beauty to reinvent. It is the link between the erotic necessity of our bodies and the critical necessity of poetry and images.
These are the gestures the festival wish to grasp.