The "Resilience 2049" exhibition grew out of the "Resilience" dance show presented at Noir Wen in April 2023. Behind the dancers, the background featured a series of portraits of "resilient" people, most of them children. The show gave little explanation for the staging, which everyone interpreted in their own way. I got a lot of feedback on these portraits, and decided to make them a permanent exhibition in my studio. The exhibition in the Michiel Bechir Gallery is a first sketch of that exhibition.
WHY RESILIENCE?
Resilience is the ability of an individual, a group or a community to adapt and recover from crisis, trauma, loss or major change in their lives.
This is what my generation and generations to come are going to have to face, forced and coerced by previous generations who were unable to mobilize to spare us from the suffering of an increasingly violent world and a planet going haywire.
WHY 2049 ?
2049 is a date that inspired two works of cinema: Blade Runner 2049 and, three years apart, Wong Kar-wai's 2046. Both films deal with the end of a world. The outside world, the inside world.
2049 marks the centenary of the Chinese revolution, and the Chinese government's project to become the world's dominant power. It's a geopolitical project in line with the logic of the empires of the past ten millennia, and one that threatens to destroy humanism.
2049, or 2050, is a key date in the IPCC reports, which see it as the climate tipping point. In the most pessimistic scenario, towards which we have been heading for as long as the IPCC has existed, the planet's average temperature will have risen by almost 2.5°C, with consequences that nobody can imagine or predict. The only thing we can be sure of is that what's about to happen is dangerous for mankind and all living beings currently on earth.
Resilience 2049 is a portrait gallery of witnesses from the year 2049 to the dangerous, violent and inhospitable world we've handed down to them.
IMAGES AND VIDEO CREATED WITH AI TOOLS
The portraits were all created exclusively with Midjourney, applying my style parameters. The application is relatively unstable today, with almost weekly updates and improvements, making the stability of my style more fragile.
I used a face animation app for the first time. The characters in the video may seem caricatured in relation to the seriousness of the subject. I'm aware of that. But I had to try. Here too, the application is regularly updated. In a recent update, after the creation of this video, the emotional mimicry of the faces was improved.