The harder the collapse hits, the more joy is needed.

Do not see in these words, a don’t look up^[1 ] diverting the eye from the causes, but a tool for revolutionary use. Joy is the binding force of our interactions, a power to act, a power to build collectively. By making the common possible, it becomes an act of resistance.

Without the common, ecological thinking is out of whack.

The planetary limits exceeded
^[2]
one by one, what can joy, what can a few immersed bodies swimming in a circle under water, without clothes, without tools, without words?

A few frantic movements to reach the surface, take a breath and dive back down, in apnea, in weightlessness: all around the water, all around life.

Together, naked, immersed in water, we deconstruct the sophistications of our culture, we redraw the immediate relationships of which nature is the first link, omnipresent, unsurpassable.

Beyond the qualities (or lack thereof) of technical composition, visual originality, and execution, it is the resonance of human ties and emotions immersed in nature that make up an aesthetic: an ethic of perception.

Since we entered the Anthropocene era, water, the origin of life, is rising. The seas are rising by 3.5 mm per year. The factors are various (melting ice, expansion of the oceans …)
^[3]
but one thing seems certain, we have a collective responsibility.

Under the paradigm of science, the rise of the seas reactivates our millennial fears of the deluge. Water is both omnipresent and precious, polymorphous, fluid, calm or stormy. The 70% of water that we are made of resonates with the equal share of water that covers the earth’s surface.

If science observes this comparison, poetry pursues it and suggests that this equality induces a relationship between the sea and ourselves: our mind, our brain, does not store our history and our memory locally, but acts as a receiver whose body constitutes the antenna which only comes to interpret and individualize our thoughts.

Our memory is the water itself. Emotion is the message, and joy is the most powerful tool to access it.

Joy itself is the motor or the pretext, the desire or the requirement of our repeated dives and immersions in these seas, lakes and rivers, as a means of enlarging the common, of enlarging the access to our collective entity.

It is under the aegis of this story, that time and again, we went underwater, in a bed of posidonia in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, We tried to fall asleep underwater (2018 ), or to play underwater music in the creeks of Trayas, Jazz underwater (2021).

All around, the water tells these stories that become images and myths.

One of them took place in September 2021 at the lake of Saint-Cassien, for the exhibition Under Chaos, Life, a sort of introduction to the exhibition All around, Water.

Hold underwater for eight seconds, come back up, dive again. We repeat this as much as possible… The camera, fixed on a flying propeller thingy, takes pictures at five second intervals.

So we had to keep at least this time, plus the time to dive, all synchronized between us. Challenging!

We were five that day: Aimée, Benoît, Diego, Katalina and Yoan.

Constrained by the surrounding objects for the realization of the scenes, we had moved stones from one bank to the other. Their weight required a collaborative effort. A work that may seem absurd or incongruous, but whose bodies are delivered to the evocative power of water, exalting our imaginations. The images that emerge are mixed with our cultural archetypes.

Each challenge has two faces, the one that opposes you and the one of the opportunity it offers. That day, it was a resolution of the founding myths of the modern individual, the myth of Sisyphus became a collective epic. By reconstructing the lost meaning of eternally repeated work in a common element.

This second face joy resounds in the water, with us.

The water in the seas is rising, the water in the rivers and lakes at the end of the summer of 2022 was at its lowest. We looked for the posidonia fields which allowed us to realize the Hydrophila series
^[4]
a few months earlier, they were out of the water.

What can joy do, if the water disappears? What can joy do if it doesn’t mutate into an electrical surge to disconnect the stock market platforms, capitalism and the Artificial Intelligences that suck up the real? What can joy be without economic decline?

These words are not an injunction to happiness, such an injunction would always be questionable if it did not require the revolutionary to sprout and grow.

Without anti-capitalist revolution, without gender revolution and without ecological revolution, joy is only entertainment.

Is the artist still this eccentric individual, attracting the light by the freedom he has to be himself, by the indifference he displays to the pressure of social norms? Is art and should it be the noise of an individual who frees himself?

Sisters of each other, art and freedom have seen during these last decades, their relationship deeply evolve. The artistic avant-garde, far from wanting to simply enjoy its freedom, lives with these ecological and social constraints in order to imagine how to build a new one, collective, in echo with its environment.

With the Anthropocene and the collapse on the horizon, artists face a major challenge. They find themselves, as a result of modernity, placed on the central cornerstone of the norms that have built the individual. While we have all become artists through technologies and networks such as Instagram and TikTok, creators of everything and nothing, Fluxus in spite of ourselves, the time has come when the artist operates a withdrawal movement, as an act of resistance and construction. And this, by putting the primacy to question again, at the same time, its relation to the environment and its relation to the collective. Without the collective, ecology stumbles and more broadly all struggles.

There will undoubtedly still be a work of catharsis produced by the art, which unties the spirit and projects worlds-works of the author, whose refinement and personal work of these creators are and will always be rich of contributions in sensitivity. It will still make a mark, but not a movement.

If it is more difficult since the 80’s to recognize the artistic movements that follow one another, it is because history still questions the individualities that carry these movements. But what has been at stake since then is no longer one artist opposing another, one individuality facing another, but something of the order of a shared struggle, of a collective freedom.

Thus, social and societal struggles and ecology have become the tripod of a movement that art and our modern societies are taking.

We can see it as a constraint, and some people express suffering from it. It is not uncommon that the concentration of themes (intersectional, feminist, social, ecological), automatically excludes a significant number of artists from the public field whose work is focused on the refinement of an individual expression without direct societal stakes. Even if it is fair to say that this moment is a system, for example the Venice Biennale has for the first time welcomed more women than men in 2022 and the Istanbul Biennale has reached a figure of about 80%, it is not fair to argue that access would be barred to those whose art would not be “minor enough”.

What gives meaning today in art is deeply connected with the common, and each of us, regardless of our identities, can only find happiness in participating in this construction.

And if our work is common, so is our intelligence.

Intelligence is a collective competence, we do not think alone, it could even be that we do not think at all, that we are only an echo, a mirage of the sum of the surrounding thoughts, themselves mirages… We do not create alone, our inventions are collective, our works too.

We are working on the construction of a sentence that is still in its infancy and that makes the link with what we think is essential: to draw a new world through our joy.

When Picasso admits, “if the small artists copy, the great artists steal” it is that he understood that little finally returns to him. The more recognized an artist is, the greater his larceny is. Everything is an echo of this collective hubbub, acquired by word, sight, serendipity or telepathy.

If theft and property are synonymous in Marx, they are also synonymous in art.

The signature which monopolizes the work is mark of the individual, it participates in the creation of the dominant history turned towards the individuals, the capital and the viriarchy. It is of the same nature as primitive accumulation, so much so that the work itself, when the artist has built up sufficient power, is finally returned to the bourgeoisie, adding cultural capital to its financial capital. As such, artists become the guarantors of the social structure
^[5]
.

Intelligence and intuition are collective resources and it is by treating them as such that we can build a relationship with nature. Whether you are a hummingbird, a localist or a revolutionary, we are crossed by paradoxes that prevent us from creating, from seeing this new world appear, while the current one is collapsing. When will this end of the light/darkness that Antonio Gramsci announced a hundred years ago?

The question is not about time, but about life. And of life, I only know the joy that contains this strength capable of resisting the growing entropy.

Science establishes predictive models, politics legislates on ecological issues, the media communicates and raises awareness.

It is common to see exhibitions that have an ecological awareness as a hook.

Art is sometimes confused with the issue of the latter, as a possibility to raise awareness of the coming climate catastrophe. However, this is not its role. It is not its role either to operate a translation between the scientific content and the public, as a way to better communicate with the emotion where the reason fails.

Art simply builds an aesthetic.

It is by this means that the freedom appeared constrained above seems to be reborn here, as the search for an aesthetic whose reports seem to be tuned to the concerns of the common. This search for agreement is the expression of freedom.

One can easily associate the idea of building an aesthetic with “looking for the new”, imagining other pictorial forms of plastic expression, and moving the limits.

Here, we define aesthetics as a set of gestures and behaviors whose source is co-constructed between the individual and his social body in order to integrate in an image the substance of this link: ethics.

That is to say to integrate by their sensitivity of the elements which will create in an image in the broad sense (photo, video, performance, sculpture?) a balance, a tension, whose sensitive, the emotion binds with a concern.

Integrate into the work a resonance of ethical perceptions of the relationship between individuals and the environment.

It differs from a more classical conception in that it implies that the elements that compose an image are always linked to a situation, to an economic, social and cultural moment. Aesthetics, before being a pure plastic discipline, that is to say a vibration of the sensitivity inside the matter, is first of all the construction of a vision.

To build this aesthetic is to build an ethics of perception.

An ethics of the perception is not reduced to the representation by an image, of an idea within a work – representation of the fragility of the nature, representation of the relations of social violence, of war – But it is well by the presence of collective behaviors (anthropo-relational, or eco-relational), that arises a balance in the image-work as a harmonious system of value whose stake is emotional.

The work becomes much more than the final shot (for photo or video), it is the sensitive work on human links and their relationship to nature.

It is through this prism that it is possible to create a palpable tension between the current collapse of our society and joy. They become inseparable as their destiny is linked.

In All around, water , the immersion of the bodies is a choice angle to build this link between us and nature.

“ We are not defending nature, we are nature defending itself. This slogan, chanted at climate protests since at least 2016, echoes this idea, and politically translates how aesthetics recomposes our identities: we no longer recognize ourselves in this individual normalized by capital (consumer), we only recognize ourselves in nature.

What does this aesthetic consist of? If it does not find its source in pictoriality, and since most of its elements are barely perceptible, how can it be given a content?

Among the many possible answers and tools, we will mention one that is called: theflying machine.

The expression ” flying machine ” is an expression that appeared in my practice well before the use of a drone, and it did not refer to this object.

The flying camera object does not only have the purpose of creating an image, it does not concern the pictorial plasticity produced, but indirectly impregnates it.

It is a method to bring out the work on the relationships that the authors have with each other and with their environment.

In practice, theflying camera or flying cameras group together during a photographic session several cameras in automatic mode most of the time, which pass from hand to hand. This blurs the stability of the relationship between the photographer and the model. The image is no longer constructed by a single look, nor by a single genre. Everyone becomes a model and a photographer in turn.

Nudity has historically had in my practice, vocation to immerse the body in nature, to remove the cultural and social marks that the dressed body emits, to declare that a naked body is not only sexual. As deconstructed as the author tries to be, the naked body tends to produce a “male gaze”, which objectifies and normalizes the female body
^[6]
.

The flying machine is in this sense a tool that collectively crosses our views, giving each individual an equal role and equal consideration. The author becomes what is common in the individual.^[7]

It remains that the collective is always ephemeral, emerges then dissolves, in an environment where the individual is enthroned. Even if it is resistant, it is difficult to free itself from the organizational modes of society.

This is why the collective is never a state of affairs, even if several tools can give it a materiality (an association, a place, a collective practice, or simply a name), it is always a counter-power against larger, more stable entities.

To the stammering of my so candid question: Is joy, besides being laughable only desirable?

Aimée Fleury refusing the all-encompassing interaction with joy answers: “I have nothing to add to joy”. This sentence resounded in my memory for a long time.

“It is suspicious at a minimum, joy is often that of the oppressors.”

If I doubt his answer, I doubt mine too.

Do I evoke, when speaking of joy, a libidinous desire, an injunction to enjoyment hidden in an ecological and social purpose, built by 5000 years of viriarchy?

“Joy does not need art, it is complete, and is sufficient to itself”, she answered me.

Much more than a manifesto, this text is a questioning. To hold from one end to the other of one’s body and mind paradoxes that will open new paradigms when the time comes.

Much more than a manifesto, it is an attempt to put together a piece of the unfinished, sometimes clumsy or erroneous sketch of the architecture of our future world.

Precious thanks to all those people who made this exhibition and book possible,

Elodie Antoine, Mona Barbagli, Tom Barbagli, Tristan Blumel, Evan Bourgeau, Katalina Cearca, Clémence, Flora Defaut, Diego Evrad, Aimée Fleury, Gabriela Guyez, Léonie Focqueu, Camille Franch-Guerra, Leah Friedman Nina Kypraios, Sarah Laouini, Anne-Sophie Lecharme, Yoan Malet, Cédric Mounier, Pénélope Morterolle, Jean-pierre Soardi, Célia Vanhoutte, Eva Vautier, Anne-Laure Wuillai, Collectif Palam, Eva Vautier gallery.

1. Don’t Look Up: Cosmic Denial, a 2021 film by Adam McKay metaphorizing climate denial. ↑
2. The planetary limits are the thresholds that humanity should not exceed in order not to compromise the favorable conditions in which it has been able to develop and to be able to live sustainably in a safe ecosystem, i.e. by avoiding brutal and difficult to predict modifications of the planetary environment.en.wikipedia.%C3% ↑
3. Source Iopscience Predictability of twentieth century sea-level rise from past data. ↑
4. Cover photograph ↑
5. Transparency commits me however to recall that I sign my works, number them, value them, rarefy them, integrate them inside a cultural movement. In short, I prepare them for their acquisition by capital, relying on both revolution and institution. And this even through this text. Difficult paradox. ↑
6. It was a difficult thing for me to overcome or even just mitigate these culturally induced social reflexes. ↑
7. The photographic sessions often contain several projects, from different artists, by putting our bodies and tools together, and after a redistribution to each of them of what they consider to be their work. Technocratically Yours created by Aimée Fleury is the result of one of these collective sessions. ↑