le le grand looking back – retour and a little ahead grand retour.pdfthat is where this book, this...

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LE GRAND RETOUR Looking Back – and a Little Ahead Place Brussels (home) Date 31 August 2018 Distance 0 km Travel time none CO 2 emitted none Organization time for this journey none A Letter: Pretext On the morning of 22 June 2018, the postman slides a letter through my letterbox. The letter is in a stamped envelope, my name and address hand- written on the front, and the sender’s information is handwritten on the back. The letter itself is also handwritten; it is a very nice letter, well composed, with a good flow. I am touched, moved: I remem- ber, I think, the last handwritten letter I ever sent, a very long time ago – I am talking decades, an- other age – in what you might call a more romantic context. I am surprised, both by the gesture and its content. The letter is about this book, which does not ex- ist yet. It comes from Maaike and Fairuz. They just moved a few kilometres outside the city centre. They have already had to drain water from their garage once, and now know what climate change means. They are the designers of this book and they have been searching for the most ecological options. They found a printer who works carbon neutral, but that is primarily thanks to the careful use of energy to compensate for any waste pro- duced during the printing process. Maaike and Fairuz themselves want to ensure that the book it- self is an ecological object – not just the printing. Le Grand Retour 1

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Page 1: le Le Grand Looking Back – Retour and a Little Ahead Grand Retour.pdfThat is where this book, this project, begins: in the world we live in. A year before that letter, I received

l e g r a n d r e to u r

Looking Back – and a Little Ahead

PlaceBrussels (home)

Date31 August2018

Distance0 km

Travel timenone

CO2 emittednone

Organization time for this journey none

A Letter: PretextOn the morning of 22 June 2018, the postman slides a letter through my letterbox. The letter is in a stamped envelope, my name and address hand-written on the front, and the sender’s information is handwritten on the back. The letter itself is also handwritten; it is a very nice letter, well composed, with a good flow. I am touched, moved: I remem-ber, I think, the last handwritten letter I ever sent, a very long time ago – I am talking decades, an-other age – in what you might call a more romantic context. I am surprised, both by the gesture and its content. The letter is about this book, which does not ex-ist yet. It comes from Maaike and Fairuz. They just moved a few kilometres outside the city centre. They have already had to drain water from their garage once, and now know what climate change means. They are the designers of this book and they have been searching for the most ecological options. They found a printer who works carbon neutral, but that is primarily thanks to the careful use of energy to compensate for any waste pro-duced during the printing process. Maaike and Fairuz themselves want to ensure that the book it-self is an ecological object – not just the printing.

Le GrandRetour1

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The letter contains some data. One printed sheet contains sixty-four pages without any waste. Sixty- four pages make up four signatures. Vegetable inks seem to be the most environmentally friendly. There is also software called Inksave, which keeps the ink settings as low as possible in the pre-press phase. The paper with the smallest ecological footprint is uncoated paper. It is the least treated paper on the market. There is some debate as to the sense, or nonsense, of Fsc labels. But the good news is that the more paper, the better! Paper guar-antees forestation (here Maaike and Fairuz quote the climate-neutral printer). Paper is the most recycled product: 70% re-enters circulation while much of the remaining 30% simply remains in cir-culation. That is also why they decided to write me a letter. If I want to read it again, as I am doing now, while writing this text, it costs the earth nothing. My computer, the screen and the server that trans-mits my emails, on the other hand, all use a lot of energy. In other words: l o n g l i v e p a p e r .

I will keep this letter for a while. I have not finished with this letter. A letter like this is something very personal. Like this book, actually. Somewhere in this book, there are two letters that I sent – elec-tronically, via the wordpress.com servers – to two artists. They make this book even more personal – a book that, by the way, began as a diary, a par-ticularly private form of writing. Or as a logbook, maybe – a form of writing for the initiated. It is no

coincidence that it begins as a blog: a travelogue in quasi real-time that would allow the partners and artists involved in this project to stay up-to-date with what is happening. The blog would allow them to anticipate events and make corrections where necessary. The readers of my blog are like the chaperons that accompanied young aristo-cratic boys on their Grand Tour in the 17th or 18th century, initiating them into the cultures and lan-guages of the European continent. A handwritten letter is not only very personal, it also takes me back in time. I come from an age when everything was done on paper. My profes-sional career started in the archive of a film club, where, as a very young boy, I catalogued books and magazines using handwritten index cards. Urgent matters were dealt with via telephone, less urgent matters via the post. My first invoices were written by hand on the club’s stencilled stationary. There was no computer (the first one arrived in the early 1990s), no fax (late 1980s) and certainly no Inter-net (mid-1990s). We did it that way because there was no other way. This letter fits what is named in the two letters elsewhere in this book: progress in reverse. It fits our nostalgia-filled times.

A few days ago, I walked by a hip shop window with the words “Le grand retour” written above a sexy, retro sports outfit. And I thought that that might make a good title for this prologue that is also a return to the events in this book.

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But progress in reverse (or Le grand retour) might also be part of some self-criticism, a measure taken against global warming that begins with yourself (and of course I do not mean dressing in tiny shorts with a matching top – though that might help). It sometimes seems better to engage in the struggle against global warming by simply not doing things. Like not eating meat, for example. Or not driving a car. Not taking airplanes. Or just not travelling at all (something I realize after nine journeys, at

a moment when I am very much looking forward to the last of my ten trips). Or not using a com-puter, the Internet, servers, Gpss, smart or dumb phones. Is that the future of the world after the cli-mate catastrophe? Not for the time being. For the time being, every-thing remains as it is, and we would do best to learn to live with what we have before coming up with solutions that only cause new problems. First take stock of the world, and then find the best way to a possible solution. Maaike and Fairuz do that with the ecological design of this book. So, too, do the artists I meet: each in his or her own way looks at the world and reflects on how to act in it. They start from everyday experiences and, more often than not, they look to the scientific data and to ways to process that data. I do the same during this Grand Tour, over the course of which I learned not only from the artists and their work, but also from the science and ideas they use.

An Email: SubtextThat is where this book, this project, begins: in the world we live in. A year before that letter, I received an email from Ilse. Ilse is the coordinator of Imag-ine 2020 in Brussels. Her message asks whether I would be interested in submitting a proposal for a documentation project about ‘Art, ecology and possible futures’. Would I be interested in visiting ten artists, selected by the ten partners of Imagine 2020, in the cities where they live and work? Would

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I be interested in interviewing the artists about their artistic-ecological citizenship? The work-ing title she suggests in the email is Vita Artistica, inspired by Hannah Arendt’s Vita Activa, a refer-ence to the co-existence of art and political engage-ment. Imagine 2020, as I also learn from the email, stands for the creation of consciousness-making, for the creation and study of prototypes of possible futures. Would I be interested in doing that? At the time I received the email, I was finishing, with a group of students, another documentation project, another book, in fact, about fashion, a book that focuses on such themes as ecology, sus-tainability, production methods, capitalism, (post-)colonialism, globalization and, ultimately, global warming. So I was not entirely unfamiliar with the issues. As it happens, I was just starting a new pro-ject about beauty – it starts with the end of beauty, the beauty of the end, beauty as an end, beauty without end; during my Grand Tour, I added a fifth point: beauty after the end – constructed around caring for the self, the organization of beauty, look-ing for what lies beyond beauty, the sharing of the commons and beauty that ultimately erases itself. Both projects continue in this documentation pro-ject, which explores (a) possible future(s) through art and ecology – a new end to work towards. I submitted my proposal rather quickly, impul-sively, and with many question marks. I changed the working title from Vita Artistica to Fear of a Blank Planet, swapping the nod to Hannah Arendt

for one to Public Enemy. The rational argumenta-tion behind the possible futures made way for un-trammelled feelings: full of anger, ready for change. As an example of the beauty of the end (something in which to believe, a goal, an end, on which to fo-cus) I refer, maybe a bit too cynically, to the hap-py end of Cop21, the climate conference in Paris, which ended with an accord that everybody (and thus nobody) could agree on. By travelling by train and bicycle, I want to make the blank space of travel tangible again – the sea, for the transport of goods for our consumer society, and the air, for flights for our tourism industry. What remains is the goal, the end, what disappears is the environment, without end. I opted for a book. Not very original, but to me it is the most enduring form: something tangible that will live on into the future. Continuing in the spirit of Public Enemy, I wanted a sampled book in which various voices encounter one another: the voices of the artists themselves, of the artists they are looking at, of the authors they are reading, of the authors I myself find on my journey. My ambitions gradually adapted to reality. And so my Grand Tour, just like this book, developed as a learning process with constantly changing perspectives, with alternating styles and rhythms that clashed with the styles and rhythms of the en-counters that preceded them. The argument of Vita Artistica – the artist as citizen – has to expand to include the citizen as artist: how to engage an audi-ence so as to make it part of your work and your

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ideas? How to create this consciousness through art? As a response to an avalanche of data, I wanted a book with feeling. A book that strives to turn feel-ings of guilt into pleasure, the fatigue of resigna-tion into the energy of involvement: a different world is possible.

A Tour: ContextThis Grand Tour is one of extremes. That, too, is entirely fitting for our times. As I write this, the world is experiencing one of the hottest summers in years: Europe is ablaze from Sweden to Greece, there are forest fires from California to Australia ... Temperature records are being broken – 41 de-grees Celsius north of the arctic line! The droughts are alarming for plants, animals and people. In July, Zaventem, the national airport about ten kilo-metres from where I’m writing this, saw the high-est number of passengers on one day. Ever. Climate scientists warn that if we do not rapidly decrease Co2 emissions, the hot summers of today will feel relatively cool in the future. According to those same scientists, the chances of heat waves will double in the future. And, as another little nug-get of news in cucumber season, I read that Earth Overshoot Day, the day on which the earth has consumed all the available resources for an entire year, occurred on 1 August this year. That is one day earlier than in 2017, and several months earlier than in 1986, when we still managed to make it all the way to 31 December.

But there are also positive news. Solar energy is breaking records left and right. In Belgium, it accounted for 8% of total use in July, where nuclear energy still accounts for 35%. I read all of this on my always-already outdated iPhone, where I also read the report that the value of Apple topped the trillion dollar threshold, and that Huawei, for the first time, is expected to sell more phones than Apple and Samsung. Is this relevant to a book about art and ecology? I think it is. What would we – artists and cultural workers – be without our smartphones and laptops? And yet, we know that the rare metals in our hardware are not inexhaust-ible, that mining them is wreaking ecological and human havoc in Congo and China, and that the energy use of the servers that manage the cloud, our social networks, emails and websites now rivals all the air traffic on earth put together. Never before have the causes and consequences of global warming been so clear. But everything simply continues as though nothing were wrong. A dangerous habituation is afoot, whereby the ex-traordinary is becoming normal and the discom-forts, once temporary and occasional, of heat and flooding are becoming permanent. You don’t win an election with global warming. And if we can no longer rely on our politicians or on our gov-ernments, we must look for solutions elsewhere. We can no longer be satisfied to think and act for ourselves: we must involve our environment, the mountains and rivers, the plants and animals, pre-

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vious and future generations. To do that, we need artists. Thierry Boutonnier talks to the animals, plants and machines on his parents’ farm. Like Lotte Van den Berg in her Parliament of Things, he is inspired by the Dingpolitik of French philoso-pher Bruno Latour. They expand their workspaces to their environment, just as Michael Pinsky does in London. Meanwhile, Clare Patey, Armin Chodz-inski and Sibylle Peters, Jānis Balodis or Benjamin Verdonck go even further by working for and with children. The new production by Beton Ltd. in Lju-bljana is oriented to the next generation, while Ta-mara Bilankov in Zagreb shifts her perspective to the previous generation. This is part of my assign-ment, which not coincidentally comes fifty years after May ’68: to look forward and to look back, to explore what remains of the engagement of that time. That is the subject of Vera Mantero’s latest pro-duction. This is also the beautiful thing about the group of artists that the partners selected for me: they are upcoming (Jānis, Tamara, Thierry), mid-ca-reer (Benjamin, Beton Ltd., Lotte) and established (Michael, Clare, Armin and Sibylle, and Vera).

My meetings with the artists brought me back ever more to the citizen, to citizenship. And thus also to the question of scale: what can we, as small indi-viduals, do against (or with?) global warming? Thus phrased, a global problem becomes an increasing-ly local issue. Your environment starts here. (Have you heard of the activists who try to stop the plastic

infestation of the oceans by writing, ‘the sea starts here’, beside sewer drains on the street?) Before I set off on this Grand Tour, I had a conversation in Brussels with Sue Spaid, the American philosopher and cura-tor from Ecovention Europe. She said the following:

To my lights, climate change is first a local issue. Yes, we as a planet are monitoring ‘global tem-perature increases’, but we are doing so country by country, with each having committed to do its part to prevent further warming. Individual communities actually have way more agency and move a lot quicker than corporations or govern-ments. Ordinary citizens can, and routinely do, plant as many trees as possible to make rainfall renewable and storm water capturable; fix dam-aged groundwater catchment systems to ensure the rainwater’s capacity to refill aquifers; farm using carbon-absorbing regenerative soils; re-construct wetlands; implement systems that neutralize the effects of greenhouse gases; and discourage new housing developments. The knowledge is everywhere … there just needs to be more local initiatives on a grander scale.

And thus we see that cities are opting for different forms of organization. We see the influence that citizens have. And we see how artists get involved, when they don’t already play guiding roles in the process. The power of the alliance between art and ecology, between art and global warming, turns

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on seeing and thinking differently. And that starts here, wherever you are. A different way of life begins with seeing things differently. What we need is an alternative percep-tion. Instead of constantly wanting to reform things and giving short shrift to reality (a classic example: the way policies promote electric cars and thus shift the problem, so that the pollution is for China, where those cars are manufactured; our politicians use deferral tac-tics: our cities are becoming blocked by infrastructure designed for individual transport, even though there is an urgent need for better and non-privatized public transport; they outsource the solutions for social prob-lems to private capitalists) we should be doing the re-verse: we should look reality in the face – as Latour does in Facing Gaia – and then think about ways to deal with that new reality without trying to reform it. Reality is inhabitable if we adapt to it, not make-able by adapting it to us. Looking reality in the face also implies recogniz-ing our own bubble: class, education, culture, na-tion…. It implies being attentive to other bubbles. Taking them into account. Opening them. Ecol-ogy does not stop at the edge of your bubble: your theatre, your school, your newspaper, your social network, your neighbourhood, your city, your country. Borders that increasingly grow into walls are the worst thing that could happen to us ecologi-cally. Because all of these bubbles put together are part of one bigger bubble: that immeasurable and ungraspable thing that we call an ecosystem and of

which we have only fragmentary knowledge, grasp and insight – nothing but bits and pieces.

That is where the ‘imagine’ of Imagine 2020 comes in again. That’s how this Grand Tour works: as a pharmakon, as a poison that is, simultaneously, the antidote. In a time of extremes, it was inevi-table that this also became a tour of extremes. In just over four months, I visited nine cities and an island. I spent 140 hours (that is the equivalent of 17,5 regular working days of 8 hours, 3,5 working weeks) travelling by train and bicycle, as well as one airplane and one boat. To make all this possi-ble, Ilse spent another 50 hours ( just over 6 work-ing days) at the Imagine 2020 headquarters to plan the trips and book tickets and hotels. I travelled about 15,470 kilometres in four months’ time – I don’t know what your life is like, but that is more than I would otherwise travel in an entire decade. This documentation project, this Grand Tour, thus became an extreme city trip: a collection of city trips, a test for an alternative means of travel that is only possible in the subsidized bubble of the cul-tural sector. Katarina from Beton Ltd. said it in Lju-bljana: in the cultural sector, we don’t travel in the summer, we don’t go on holiday, we travel for work and work in the summer. We do it because we can and because we must: this assignment is my job. Then it became increasingly clear to me that ecology is a luxury. Because we can and because we must? That depends on where you are, and on who you are.

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(In a conversation with Tim Etchells – you can find the video easily online – Vera Mantero talks about how the arrival of the railway changed life in the city: it en-larges the natural maximum distance, allows food no longer to be produced near the city, detaches the city from its environment, and gives the city a new face, a new feeling, a new experience. I am reminded of that when I see how Lisbon, Vera’s city, is flooded with tour-ists. In the botanical gardens, I hear about as many languages as there are species of plants. Meanwhile, an airplane roars overhead every five minutes, bring-ing another load of tourists. That is how the airplane changes the face, the feeling and the experience of this city. The same is true – to a greater or lesser extent – of the other cities that I visited on this Grand Tour.) It is not only the travel and the meetings that are a pharmakon. This book is one too. This is a book of extremes. The complete project took less than a year to complete: the journey started on 20 Feb-ruary, and the book presentation is scheduled for the end of November. No ordinary publisher would risk it. So we are doing it all ourselves – because we can and because we must. Because, after using as much as possible alternative, and ecological, means to travel, we want to explore the boundaries of alternative publishing. How far can we go? What kind of paper do we use? Which printer? Which machines? Which ink? In which way? How will we distribute the book? What will the print-run be? Will this book be sold? Given? Passed on?

A Moment: TextThis book developed like a snapshot: a sign of the times, of its art and its ecology. It follows the chro-nology of the journey in reverse, with the encoun-ters arranged in sequence. The reader will soon notice that this journey was not so much a tour as a game of hopscotch, during which I always returned home. You may also read this book as a game of hopscotch, jumping between the various pieces and across the different artists. You can also read it back to front, but that is not necessary. If you do, however, you might notice how I grew along with the assignment. Like many other citizens, I have a certain ecological consciousness. More than half a life ago, I decided to stop eating meat because it requires so much more energy and resources than a vegetarian diet. Cycling is something I grew up with as a child, and I continued to do it after I moved to the city as a young adult. (Do you some-times see the signs that say, ‘One Car Less!’, attached to bicycle saddles?

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That really makes no sense to me. All I see is one more bicycle. Why do we always use the car as a reference point when it comes to transport? I have the same prob-lem with digital route planners. Everything is focused on cars and, all-too-often, bicycles are simply forgot-ten. This was mirrored in planning the trips for the Grand Tour: just try organizing a train journey to Rīga or booking train tickets to Lisbon. Easyjet would get you there much faster, at a fraction of the cost. That is the reference point and that has to change.) For the past fifteen years, any trip that was too far to do on a bike, I’d take the train and bring my folding bike along. I do not have any children, but I am like Donna Haraway (in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene) in that I enjoy taking care of my relatives: family, friends, neighbours, their plants and animals. But it doesn’t go much further than that; I do on occasion vote for a politician with an ecological consciousness, preferably combined with a social commitment. (Before I forget: I also compost. During my Grand Tour, I realized on several occasions – in Lyon, in Rot-terdam, in Rīga and in Lisbon – how important the worms in my homemade compost bin on my balcony are: they are my only pets and, increasingly, my fa-vourite animals. They provide solutions for so many problems. Later, when I die, I want to be composted, like in the little book that I found on my journey: Plaid-oyer pour l’humusation. I saw the following sign in an exhibition by Laure Prouvost:

It inspired me. Should I turn it into a slogan that suits me? Global worming, not warming!) This book – I said it earlier – is part of a learn-ing process (hence the reference to the historical Grand Tour that 17th and 18th century aristocrats would embark on). It was not just about learning to organize my meetings, the first of which were rela-tively short, though soon they became longer, and the interviews, which had been my initial assign-ment, started to make space for meetings during which I would follow the artists, not only in their work, but also in their surroundings. This required a certain degree of improvisation, as well as a great deal of patience from those involved, a generous willingness to spend the time and let things hap-pen. Along with the artists, I questioned myself and my position regularly. Similarly, questions were regularly raised about the value of an inter-national network like Imagine 2020: for the one it loses significance the closer we come to the magi-

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cal year in its name, for the other that is precisely what makes it increasingly pressing. I met each of the artists for the first time (but not the last) on this Grand Tour. By growing in these encounters, more opportunities opened up along the way to discover what goes on around the works. Through their professional lives, I increasingly al-lowed myself a glimpse into the artists’ personal lives. The work, and the life, begins with caring for the other, for one’s environment, and ends with caring for oneself. By coincidence, my first meet-ings were with curators: Sue Spaid in Brussels (I looked her up before embarking on my journeys to acquaint myself with the subject matter), and Michael Pinsky and Clare Patey in London. With them, I explored the origins of the word curator: to care. What does this care consist of in the work of a curator? In the words of Sue Spaid, it consists in ‘provoking thoughts by guiding audiences to make particular connections’. From there, the themes evolved to the organization of the work and the role of the artist as an author (Thierry, Armin & Sibylle, Lotte, Jānis) and continued to the role of the econo-my, the pressure of time, the importance of educa-tion, of doubt and uncertainty, of waste, of taking the measure of things and of experiments in failing. Woven into all these themes another, uninvited, issue recurred frequently: language. Coinciden-tally, my first conversations – with an American in Brussels and two Brits in London – were, rather predictably, conducted in English. Equally predict-

ably, one of the conditions imposed by Imagine 2020 was that I’d conduct this documentation pro-ject in English. Soon enough, however, this started to feel very far from obvious: how strange it is to use only this language. My native tongue is Dutch, and I’ve lived all my life in Belgium, a country with three official languages: Dutch, French and Ger-man. Over the past few years, due to globalization and the growth of European institutions in Brus-sels, where I live, English has increasingly become the country’s unofficial fourth language. That part-ly explains why I accepted the condition for this assignment as self-evident. In practice, however, it is not at all self-evident. While visiting artists whose languages I can more or less speak (Benja-min in Belgium, Lotte in the Netherlands, Thierry in France and Armin and Sibylle in Germany), it felt artificial to use a language not common to any of us. With artists whose languages I do not speak (Jānis in Latvia, Beton Ltd. in Slovenia, Tamara in Croatia or Vera in Portugal), it was a necessity. Still, it felt strange, it ran counter to my sense of ecology. A question of language ecology is what is at stake in a way of communicating and, thus, of thinking and seeing. Eileen Myles writes about this in The Importance of Being Iceland:

There’s an imprecise mourning needed to see where we are now. I think it’s like the species rediscovering itself. Learning to be stubborn in our awkward speaking and hearing. All over the

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world regional accents are vanishing because of the homogenizing power of announcers’ voices normalizing everything, until everything started to go away. The landscape and the voices. There’s an ecology of sound. Of speech. We have to think about what English does. Riding roughshod over national poetries that since the room is small and no one’s in there why not step out to the bright light of day and write in English, think like us. Speaking the language of the global crash. Peo-ple are standing outside in Reykjavik, demon-strating, demanding the Prime Minister to step down. I can’t read the signs but I get it.

That is how I often felt in my meetings with the art-ists on this Grand Tour: limited and forced to use the language of the global crash. This, too, makes ecology a local matter, something that needs to be translated time and again to one’s environment – to the situation, and the language, of the one who observes. ‘We’re in this together’, Rosi Braidotti says in Transpositions, but each with our own language, needs and customs. Accepting this is the first step in the struggle against global warming. Ecology begins with oneself. Hence the impor-tance of a healthy dose of self-criticism from time to time. Here I allow myself another jump, from today to May ’68 and the auto-critique that filmmak-ers like Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin in-corporated into their Dziga Vertov Group films. A few years later, in Histoire(s) du cinéma, Jean-Luc

Godard imagines the following dialogue:

Qu’est-ce que le cinéma ? Rien. Que veut-il ? Tout. Que peut-il ? Quelque chose.

(What is cinema? Nothing. What does it want?Everything.What can it do?Something.)

In its own way, this book asks the same questions of art.

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The Imagine 2020 (2.0) partners are

ArtsadminToynbee Studios 28 Commercial StreetLondon, E1 6ABUnited Kingdom+44 20 7247 5102 artsadmin.co.uk

Bunker ProductionsSlomškova 71000 Ljubljana, Slovenia+386 1 231 44 92 bunker.si

Coal

2 rue Caffarelli75003 Paris, France+33 1 75 57 87 63projetcoal.org

DominoPetrinjska 3810000 Zagreb, Croatia+385 1 3820 019 thisisadominoproject.org

Egeac Teatro Maria Matos Av. Frei Miguel Contreiras 521700-213 Lisboa, Portugal+351 218 820 090arquivoteatromariamatos.pt

KaaitheaterAkenkaai 21000 Brussel, Belgium+32 2 201 58 58 kaaitheater.be

Kampnagel Internationale Kulturfabrik GmbHJarrestrasse 2022303 Hamburg, Germany+49 40 270 949 89 kampnagel.de

Lift

28 Commercial StreetLondon, E1 6ABUnited Kingdom+44 20 7093 6340 liftfestival.com

New Theatre Institute of LatviaMiera iela 39–21001 Rīga, Latvia+371 6 722 84 77 theatre.lv

Theater RotterdamSchouwburgplein 253012CL RotterdamThe Netherlands+31 10 40 441 11theaterrotterdam.nl

Published by Kaaitheater, Brussels, in the framework of Imagine 2020 Text Pieter Van Bogaert Copyediting Emiliano Battista Design Maaike & Fairuz | garage64.beDrawings Maaike Beuten from photos by Pieter Van BogaertCoordination Ilse Joliet

Translations (Dutch to English)‘Just Don’t Do It’ by Lotte Decaesstecker, ‘Le Grand Retour’ and ‘The Making of’ by John ArblasterProofreading Oonagh Duckworth, Mark Godber, Dan Jacques, Judith Knight, Bonnie Smith

Printed by Graphius, GhentEdition of 700 copiesISBN 9789078312000Legal deposit D/2018/2871/1Nur-code 640

Longer versions of some of the texts in this book are available atgrandtour2020.wordpress.com

Imagine 2020 (2.0) is funded with support from the European Union. The publication reflects the views only of the author, and the commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

g r a n d to u r 2020 c o l o p h o n

Page 13: le Le Grand Looking Back – Retour and a Little Ahead Grand Retour.pdfThat is where this book, this project, begins: in the world we live in. A year before that letter, I received

2018 marks the ten-year anniversary of Imagine 2020, a collaborative project on art and ecology started by a group of European cultural organi-zations. Over the years, the project’s focus shifted away from raising awareness about climate change, and towards speculating about a sustain-able future through artistic creations that allow alternative perspectives to come to the fore. To celebrate this anniver-sary, Imagine 2020 invited me on a Grand Tour, in the course of which I visited artists who had been chosen by the dif-ferent organizations. And so it was that, in the spring of 2018, I met with ten artists in the cities where they live and work: Antwerp, Hamburg, Lis-bon, Ljubljana, London, Lyon, Riga, Rotterdam, Terschelling and Zagreb. I travelled by train and bicycle; once, I took an airplane, and once a boat. This book offers bits and pieces of the conversations and experi-ences I gathered on the road.

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IMAGINE 2020 m e e t i n g s ac r o s s e u r o p e o n a r t a n d e c o l o gy

p i e t e r va n b o g a e r t

15 €

LE GRAND RETOUR

lotte van den bergvera manterobenjamin verdoncktamara bilankovbeton ltdFUCK MACRON!

janis balodisFLYING TO RIGAIMAGINE 2060

armin chodzinski & sibylle petersthierry boutonnierclare pateymichael pinskyON THE MAKING OF THIS BOOK