To deliver a speech in public space is at the core of our creative practice.
Not to build an arena. But to find a way to say, in the heart of the city, its movement.
To scrape away the veneer of incentives, the commercial ones (be happy) or the security-obsessed ones (be careful), to plow a furrow in order to bring up other words from below.
From the city passengers.
And from us.
Never forgetting that : to speak is always to speak in someone else's place.
To give a speech in public space is also to step in the political one.
While the campaign for the municipal elections is starting, while a new type of councillors is appearing, for whom culture is just a gesture, a public relations lever, a spending adjustment, we will have to stand again, relentless, to state loud and clear that art does not fit in calls for proposals, contradictory specifications bills, evening events and numbers of spectators or schoolchildren.
We are, with the nurses and the teachers, the obligated guarantors, who, in the face of media panic and confused ideologies, must hammer home this evidence at all times :
without education, without culture, without health, there is no such thing as a sustainable society project.
This three cornerstones of the community come under its responsability and as such cannot fall within the private sector.
History tells us how self-evident is this truth. Having to defend it in 2019 reveals how much pragmatism and common sense lack to our times.
And how combative we must be.
17/07/2019