Copernicus told us that the earth was not the center. Darwin told us that man is not the center. If we listened to the anthropologists we might hear them telling us, with appropriate indirectness, that the White West is not the center. The center of the world is a bluff on the Klamath River, a rock in Mecca, a hole in the ground in Greece, nowhere, its circumference everywhere. Perhapsthe utopistshould heed this unsettling news at last. Perhapsthe utopist would do well to lose the plan, throw away the map, get off the motorcycle, put on a very strange-looking hat, bark sharply three times, and trot off looking thin, yellow, and dingy across the desert and up into the digger pines. I don’t think we’re ever going to get to utopia again by going forward, but only roundabout or sideways; because we’re in a rational dilemma, an either/or situation as perceived by the binary computer mentality, and neither the either nor the or is a place where people can live. Increasingly often in these increasingly hard times I am asked by people I respect and admire, “Are you going to write books about the terrible injustice and misery of our world, or are you going to write escapist and consolatory fantasies?” I am urged by some to do one — by some to do the other. I am offered the Grand Inquisitor’s choice. Will you choose freedom without happiness, or happiness without freedom? The only answer one can make, I think is: No.

Ursula K. Le Guin
A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be

☛ ANTOINE GRANIER, Nino for friends. Gemini Ascending Scorpio. Born a little before the year two thousand, between the two tropics. He composes urban and rural treasure hunts where whimsical and lunar characters meet and sometimes combine. Inspired by science fiction, the New Wave and popular festivals, Antoine Granier proposes in his films and installations stagings in which hierarchies are overturned, where everything is parodied and reinvested.

☛ HÉLÈNE MOURRIER aka H., is a graphic designer and visual artist who grew up with vectorial drawing, transfeminism and the sound of the Queer clubs. Hélène belongs to the B.I.T.C.H. organization founded by Jo Freeman in 1969 and is the residue of crossbreeding between Kathy Acker & Donna Haraway, Paul B. Preciado & Valérie Solanas, Monique Wittig & Elsa Dorlin. H. struggles for queer and marginalized bodies in the fields of activism, art and design: because they are BODIES THAT MATTER.

☛ CÉCILE SERRES stages trans- and multi-specific narratives in which furniture sculptures, costumes and props made of synthetic materials, silicone, faux leather or latex are activated by one or more performers. Her literary and digital writing work as well as her camp aesthetic plastic practice are born from a network of encounters with and between a group of beings and characters, human or not, who populate her installations.

Credits : Elliot-Gaillardon