Sensing Nature
For its 17th edition, titled Sensing Nature, MOMENTA Biennale de l’image humbly urges us to consider environmental justice and its intersections with social justice as a matter of sensing and feeling as much as of analysis and grassroots activism. Although science is critically needed—not least to tackle the climate emergency—our planetary assembly of multiplicities also craves forms of knowing, feeling, and doing that create different arrangements of coexistence.
A longing for togetherness—for love—echoes insistently in the exhibitions and in this book, asking us to fathom other possible forms of worldmaking. The artists and authors invite us to forge intimate kinships with nonhuman life-worlds. They propose that we listen to—and observe, smell, touch, speak to—the land, the water, the air not with the aim of distantly understanding, grasping, or exploiting, but to resonate, to vibrate, to be together. Or, perhaps, with no aim at all. They make room for stories that dwell in the blurred boundaries between technology and ancestral wisdoms, weaving in both human and nonhuman modes of knowing. They celebrate that we are in relation with nature, that we are of nature.
Fully illustrated in color, the exhibition catalog includes three essays, artist texts and portfolios on each of the 51 artists participating in this edition.
The Life of Things
Today, mass production of objects is tending to redefine the lines between material things—supposedly inert and passive—and human beings—considered the only subjects endowed with agency. Far from being impermeable to this redefinition, the image is now spreading beyond the two-dimensional space: it is becoming an object in itself. The artists and authors in this book thus explore the universes that are being built between individuals and their material environment, highlighting the reciprocal relations that are formed between subject and object.
Curator: María Wills Londoño, in collaboration with
Audrey Genois and Maude Johnson
With the contributions of artists and authors: Amanda de la Garza, Anne-Marie Dubois, Kapwani Kiwanga, Sara Knelman, Maryse Larivière, and Dominique Quessada
What Does the Image Stand For?
Images are now so insidiously omnipresent that their nature has been obliterated. At one time photographs were indicators of reality, but how do they function today? Now that images of the whole world are being captured by everyone at every moment, what do images have to say? By considering the content and meaning of fixed and moving images, the artists and authors in this volume invite readers to cast a critical eye upon testimonials offered.
Curator Joan Fontcuberta
Curator Paul Wombell
Curator Anne-Marie Ninacs
Curator Gaëlle Morel
Curator Marie Fraser
Curator Martha Langford
Curator Vincent Lavoie
Curator Marie-Josée Jean
Curators Pierre Blache, Marie-Josée Jean, and Anne-Marie Ninacs
