PROLOGUE

The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. ⁽¹⁾ 

And why not begin with songs? In the Grand Hall, men in suits and ties start the Internationale, then, after having covered their faces with a nylon stocking which makes them ridiculously unsettling, Heigh-Ho, the tune of the dwarfs returning from work in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by Walt Disney. These two songs have rocked the entire 20th century, like ambient music in a supermarket. Now, we know the communist utopia, which promised happiness for all, went up in smoke, while the idea of joyously working evokes sinister chimneys. With Men in Pink, whose choir is made up of homosexuals, Sylvie Blocher recalls the participation of shadow and contradictions in ideological schemas which continue to influence, or even govern us. 

Whilst strolling beneath the magnificent glass canopy, one also discovers the figures of Miguel Branco which open onto other, strange and poetic, dimensions, while the sculpture evoking a well or a fountain by Bill Woodrow introduces the ideas of the value of exchange and interaction of the museum with its public.

To revisit historical utopias, official stories, social and economic realities; to become filled with aesthetic experiences and visual poetry; to relive eternal human passions: to enter a museum and be confronted by a work of art is a way of distancing oneself from the exterior world and from oneself, to be, perhaps, even closer upon leaving.

_{(1) Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Foreword to the 1946 edition}