OFLUXO

At the end of July, the testosterone fuelled dream of space conquest hit the ground without a bang. Within a few days, two billionaires and a handful of their followers spent a few minutes of weightlessness just about a hundred kilometres above Earth. These first steps towards the privatisation of the great beyond for the benefit of the 0.0001% will have achieved one thing: aiming for the limit rather than for the infinite will always reek of colonial domination,  stuck in a frame of the narrow thoughts of an outdated modern positivism. However, as soon as we contemplate the faraway horizon as it presents itself in all its iridescent uncertainty, the experience of a radical unknown sets forth with a clean slate for what is known and perceived. Just like it is true for a mirage, an elusive and fleeting apparition, a hallucination or more simply a dazzle, we can surreptitiously hear a whisper saying that no, not everything has already been explored, filed, commodified, Googlemapped; that no, we are not too late and mysteries remain and finally that no, what is terrestrial doesn’t stop to expand or grow just as long as our gaze upon it remains humble and we let it freely bloom. The collective exhibition “Si nous n’avions pas vu les étoiles” (If we hadn’t see the stars), originated from the ambition, both humble and boundless, of re-energising imagination. Its name is a quote from astrophysicist Michel Mayor who discovered the first exoplanet in 1995 – a planet outside the Solar system – from the Haute-Provence Observatory. A hundred kilometres from there in 2021, on the 9th floor of Buropolis in Marseilles, about 20 artists decided to unite and make the Nobel Prize recipient’s quote resonate once more by asking themselves how would have thought evolved if the light of stars had not drawn humanity’s gaze.

In 1974, philosopher Theodor W. Adorno lamented about those “stars that fell down to Earth” 1 , after he witnessed what he called the rise of the occult and the irrational in the mainstream culture of the second half of the 20th century. By setting bedazzlement at the center of its perceptual experience, if we hadn’t seen the stars reverses the phrase’s significance: without a doubt the stars fell down to Earth, but only thanks to the endlessly renewed effort of the artists who lure and call to them, carried forward by the knowledge that this is an antidote which devise a way to rebuild a Future that does not rest on the delusions of grandeur harboured by techno-icaruses.