edition
vivants
05
20
Inventing the 32nd of May
We live in strange times, and we live in a estranged time.
— Time, Capitalism and Alienation: A Socio-Historical Inquiry into the Making of Modern Time, Jonathan Martineau
There are spaces that exist outside of the reach measurable and quantifiable of time. Spaces where time seems to slow down or speed up unexpectedly. Places where the present becomes a tangible thing, rather than an abstraction.
When imagining the 14th edition of the festival, we wanted to give people more time to take in other temporalities, lending another rhythm to what might seem inevitable to us. We tried to create new time, draft new calendars, imagine new interstices that we can fully occupy, coordinate widespread deceleration and abandon ourselves to this force that we cannot control. And then unexpectedly in the last months, our aspirations have been exceeded by reality. Our questions materialized abruptly in our daily lives while the context forces us to stop to listen.
If we don’t know yet what will remain of the world that we are now leaving behind, or what to expect next, we make the daring gamble to invent a deconfined festival. We invited the artists to present original artworks, thus allowing their necessary voices to reach you. Whether through your headphones, your mailbox or online, we commit through different forms to preserve the live experience, the fragile and sensitive that unites us despite the distance between us.
This is an invitation to meeting and a celebration of the risk of creating, for the artists and the public alike. Let’s continue to shake up our preconceived ideas, our perceptions, our fictions and everything that defines our relationship to the world. Let artists give us access to what took shape in the urgency, but with infinite patience. And in this moment of collective wandering, let’s reclaim this space of projections and dreams that is time.
We’ll meet again on the other side of this forced pause to activate the rest. In the meantime, let us invent together the 32nd of May.
Vincent de Repentigny, Artistic and General Director and the whole festival team