We are not the number we think we are
OFF-SITE
Cité internationale des arts (18 rue de l’Hôtel de ville, 75004 Paris)
An Arts & Sciences event to imagine the future!
From Friday, February 2nd to Saturday, February 3rd 2018
2 days and 1 night, 36 hours non-stop
“We are not the number we think we are” will offer an experience for 36 hours non-stop, involving hundreds of artists, researchers and thinkers from various geographical and disciplinary backgrounds. At the heart of the project: within working spaces, focusing on heterogeneous groups of people and collectives, gathered temporarily around pressing issues of our contemporary world. They will take over multiple spaces within the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, a meeting ground open to the dialogue between cultures where visitors will be invited to reflect on the present and map together pathways for the future. The common thread of this boundless programme is the fictional world of The Compass Rose (1982) a book of short stories by science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin.
We will be searching for "a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submited to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange." (Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York; Routledge, 1991.
"We are not the number we think we are" will depart from Ursula K. Le Guin’s collection of short stories, The Compass Rose, to explore the realm of fiction and create the necessary distance from bare reality to best understand the issues of the present time. We will try to sketch the landscape of what could exist in the future by drawing some lines from these short stories, which by their great variety of tones and subjects invite us to move in every direction at once. They explore fantastic futures, that are imaginary, but likely, making us envision other worlds while showing us the one we know. They will script to inhabit different realities, and build alternatives to the way we live today. We will try to get out of our comfort zone, accept the unpredictable, find our way through the unknown and question again the value of evidence, doubt, accident and investigation.
The exploration of these fictional continents will temporarily take over the Cité internationale des arts. It will become the place where processes of work and development of knowledge will be made palpable, visible, audible. Over two days and one night, scientists, artists, designers, researchers in human sciences, curators, and many others will gather and get involved in the construction of new types of experiences to question our certainties and test hypotheses on what we believe and what we know, and allow for the emergence of new forms of situated knowledge. The dialogue between these participants will allow us to ask ourselves this fundamental question: how to invent forms which summon and represent, which activate and mobilize by involving constellations of players in order to imagine a desirable future and a project of society that emerges from our collective will?
An event of the Daniel & Nina Carasso Foundation in partnership with the “arts & sciences” Chair, founded by the École polytechnique / École nationale supérieure des Arts
Décoratifs – PSL / Daniel & Nina Carasso Foundation and the Cité internationale des arts.
Produced by Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research & Villa Vassilieff
Curated by Mélanie Bouteloup
Steering comitee: Samuel Bianchini (EnsAD), Jean-Marc Chomaz (École polytechnique), Emmanuel Mahé (EnsAD - PSL), Anastassia Makridou-Bretonneau (Daniel & Nina Carasso Foundation), Valérie Pihet (SACRe - PSL) and Bénédicte Alliot (Cité internationale des arts)
Free entry (subject to availability)*
* Except for the Discontrol Party, 10pm-5:30am – 10€.
Tickets www.micadanses.com/billetterie
You can find all news on www.chaire-arts-sciences.org
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