Transforming ourselves, COAL 2024 Prize
IHEPAT's approach inspired the COAL 2024 Prize's call for entries entitled "Se transformer". IHEPAT is a partner and jury member of this Prize.
Everything transforms, as the saying goes: chrysalis into butterfly, carbon into oil, solar energy into organic matter, seed into plant, dead matter into humus, winter into spring. Everything is transformed so that everything remains. Yet, by inventing ourselves as "masters and possessors", the human species has set about this transformation to the point of distorting its principles. It has broken natural cycles and cut into the fabric of life to the rhythm of a hyper-transformation inscribed indefinitely in geological strata. Today, the consequences of these disruptions are prompting us to embark on another transformation, this time no longer outside us, but within us, in our ways of acting and living, of living and thinking, in order to make peace with the Earth.
In this quest, the artist once again appears as the scout of these peaceful transformations, he who gives form to matter and materiality to forms, he who does not conform but informs and transforms with consideration. Transformative artistic practices exist and are emerging like swarms. Stemming from collective and participatory processes, but lived in the intimate and situational, they instill change that is inseparably individual and communal, with others than oneself and others than humans, trusting in the potential of experience in all its dimensions. Transdisciplinary by nature, they interact and reinvent uses without age or frontier, whether they be artisanal, culinary, gardening, ritual, spiritual, poetic, dreamlike, somatic, festive, militant, performative, subversive or legal, organizational, relational, administrative, logistical...
Through their exploratory approaches, these practices embrace the radical uncertainty of a changing world, the better to distance themselves from the dogmas enunciated by a willingly technocratic solutionism. They invite situated knowledge rather than expert knowledge, and provide experiential support for evolving capacities rather than imposing changes in behavior. They transform in the literal sense, by creating forms that can be appropriated by others to give everyone the desire and power to act.
To federate these fundamental upheavals, the COAL 2024 Prize is calling on artists who deploy restorative practices, individually or in groups; approaches to reconnection that are at once somatic, sensory and spiritual; know-how of the hand and the earth; often in atypical, non-institutional cultural venues, veritable open-air laboratories, grounds for experimenting with concrete, realistic ecotopias for better living together. By cultivating resistance and resilience in the face of the world's Great Transformation, artists are not only actors of change, they give us the power to embody it, and thus respond to Gandhi's call: "Be the change you want to see in the world".