OF OUR TERRITORIES

But there is also the critical view, not deprived of humour and tenderness, of the real worlds: can you stop yourself from smiling when the interminable discussions on assimilation and political integration are made concrete by a domestic puzzle in the shape of a country to straighten out yourself with the help of a nail file (Alexandra Croitoru)? Or when our shop windows conjure up altars dedicated to the unassailable gods of global consumerism (Valérie Belin)? And what can be said of the confusion of languages in the innocent Disney jungle when it is revisited by an artist living in an era of globalisation (Pierre Bismuth)? Or even, stereotypical domestic interiors which condition with normality and whose banality disappears faced with the unforeseeable burst of amorous passion (Sylvie Blocher)?

Then there are those who make their own territories by collecting together scattered elements from urban and industrial jungles (Pedro Cabrita Reis), those who imagine their own paradise in the virtual world (Haluk Akakçe), and those who observe the world from their personal orbit thus in a kind of parody of the indiscretion of Google Earth (Miguel Palma)?

Still others link up cultures distant in time and space. This is the case of Su-Mei Tse whose fountain pours out ink from China as if all the words written since the invention of writing in the East and West were only for seizing the memory of the gurgling of water in a baroque garden basin.

Not counting, finally, those who tell us that the only truth about the world is that which we make up in our heads, for better or for worse, for political, religious or poetic ends: and in the end, why would our earth not be as flat as a plate (Nedko Solakov)?

_{(1) & (2)  Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932}