We navigate life hesitantly, surrounded by threats whose effects we learn to recognise even before we know how to name them. PFAS, cadmium, microplastics, air pollution, viruses, radiation. These words circulate in our conversations, appear in the media, and accumulate in the soil, water and our bodies. They form a diffuse geography of contamination, without clear boundaries, where the threat does not always manifest itself through spectacular effects but through a diffuse, almost ordinary presence.
Manon Barbe is fascinated by landscapes that appear peaceful. Fields, ponds, wastelands, deserts where nothing seems to happen except that time passes more slowly there than elsewhere. Yet some of these places have been affected by disasters. They remain contaminated, even more enduringly than the memory we will retain of them. What goes unnoticed harbours immense power: the landscape continues to offer its beauty whilst something else is at work beneath its surface.

What does our body perceive when it pauses before a contaminated landscape? What are we really looking at when nothing seems visible? How do we inhabit a world in which harm circulates through the air, the soil and living organisms?
With “Radiant hearts”, Manon Barbe sets out to explore the ongoing interplay between being affected and transmitting.
An irradiated heart is a heart that has been affected. But it is also a focal point, a source of emission. Something that receives as much as it emits.
Between vulnerability and power, between being affected and radiating, what do we make of what passes through us? How do these disturbances alter the ways in which we live, love, create and resist? How does what affects us, in turn, affect the world around us?

What replaces the fractured imaginaries of intact territories, preserved environments and healthy bodies? Yet no territory is perfectly separate from another. No body can completely seal itself off from its environment. No life is entirely protected.

How do we live under altered conditions? How do we sustain life amidst wounds, transformations and uncertainties? How do we continue to generate movement when dominant narratives promise us, first and foremost, control, mastery or repair?

Perhaps alteration is not merely a loss. Perhaps it opens up a space where other forms of relationship become possible.
During this workshop, we will start with our own contaminations: those we inherit, those that pass through us, those we pass on. We will explore the interactions between bodies, landscapes, memories, fears and desires.

Writing will become a field of interference.

Our texts will form a chorus—not a unified voice, but a collection of focal points that respond to one another, shift and influence each other. We shall move forward by drifting; we shall let wandering give rise to its own forms of knowledge.
For irradiated landscapes are not static.
They transform imperceptibly. They displace that which moves them. And they recompose their landscapes at the whim of the wind.
Perhaps the same is true of us.
Let us irradiate.