What is tomorrow made of? Artists probe consumerist society and planetary crisis
Nobody can predict what tomorrow will look like, but one thing is certain: if humanity doesn’t rethink its relationship with the environment, there will be no future. Two dozen artists were invited to participate in a collective exhibition in Paris under the title "Tomorrow is Cancelled – Art and Views on Moderation". They explored the concept of less is more.
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From the cost of living to inflation, and from war to global warming, the word "catastrophe" seems to be on every news channel.
Therefore, the idea of organising an art exhibition around the notion of austerity in the face of a declining planet probably doesn’t sound very enchanting.
But this was precisely the challenge for the team of curators behind the exhibition "Tomorrow is Cancelled – Art and Views on Moderation" at the EDF Group Foundation in Paris, on display until 29 September.
"It’s difficult to do an exhibition on sobriety. At the beginning we said to ourselves 'everyone is going to come out of this exhibition and commit suicide, it's going to be horrible'," says Nathalie Bazoche, head of cultural development at the foundation, a branch of France’s national energy company Electricité de France.
Sobriety, or sobriété in French, can mean either solemn, or sober (from not drinking alcohol) in English, but for the sake of the exhibition, it has been translated as moderation.
At first, the crossed-out title sends out a negative message, it suggests that something is wrong. The viewer is intrigued to know why tomorrow might be cancelled, and who cancelled it.
The lines behind the text come from a graphic triptych designed by French artist Rero, who borrowed the "warming stripes" invented by climatologist Edward Hawkins to demonstrate the differences in the earth's temperature over time.
The coloured vertical lines in blues and reds represent the flucuation of temperature recorded over the decades.
Alongside Rero, 22 other contemporary artists, mostly from France, were asked to take the climate crisis into account and interpret the concept of "moderation".
Can less be more?
What would happen if humanity chose to scale back rampant consumerism and make serious lifestyle changes?
Can we be happy with less? Can less be more? Can technical innovation serve social, political and ecological progress?
The result is an eclectic, surprising selection of works in different mediums ranging from photography, sculpture, video, architecture and painting, divided up into five spaces.
In the space dedicated to "uncertainty", there is a huge sculpture made of plastic bottle caps, fishing nets and toothpaste tubes by Zimbabwean artist Moffat Takadiwa – a message to Western society about colonialism, represented by plastic waste.
In the section on "spirituality", Rita Alaoui’s video performance shows the process of making ancestral remedies from medicinal plants like her Moroccan grandmother did.
"The idea was precisely not to stay on the purely material side of things," French philosopher and writer Dominique Bourg told RFI.
He was invited to be co-curator to put together the exhibition alongside Bazoche and Patrice Chazottes.
Bourg points out that even though we tend to think of reducing consumerism in terms of physical actions (lowering temperature, turning off lights) and reducing waste (buying less clothes, recycling) there is also an important intangible part of the process.
This, he says, is about questioning one’s values and finding a form of spirituality, in harmony with the environment.
Painful rebirth
Compared to the 16th century when explorers were mapping the globe and scientific experimentation was taking off, "the world has shrunk, it is becoming more difficult to live in, we are confronted by the limits of the earth", he says.
"The earth is giving birth to a new way of being. The birth will be a little painful," he says.
Nathalie Bazoche remains optimistic. "Young people are super inventive, they will come up with lots of great ideas for us," she says.
Tomorrow is Cancelled – Art and views on moderation is on at the Fondation EDF in Paris until 29 September, 2024.
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