Fond affections: a space for tenderness

“The artistic program of MIRfestival 2023 has been created, as before, with the same concern for humanity and humanism, for politics, art and society, and for their relationship with utopia. With the same longing to connect art with the sphere of political thought. And this time the questions raised recurring in the works are urgent: What will be the “after” of the catastrophe? How can we inhabit a destroyed planet? How could we manage (to paraphrase T.S. Eliot) to make the dead earth fill with flowers – literally and metaphorically? How does life resuscitate after the disaster? How does a smile emerge after sorrow? How is a spring born in the heart of winter? A renaissance in plenty middle ages? Maybe it is time to realize the disaster.
MIR 2023 sensed the need for an adventure in the dark landscape that surrounds us. For a libation to the regenerative forces. For a totally unexpected experience. And we created it. Under the sounds of this song by our beloved This Mortal Coil, speaking in its punk aesthetic of this meta-situation, we let tenderness become our common ground. We let the poetics in, as a remedy and as a revolutionary political act. And our faith in humanity as a compass.
It is often said that without a sense of the past, people cannot look into the future. But the opposite may also be true: without a vision of the future, people may be unable to shape an image of the past that can be useful to them. By opening cracks for us to peep into the future, MIR projects images of a utopian present that we may find difficult to understand or imagine or believe, and bridges them with the past and the future. What will, then, be the future of the human community? What is it that will remain of the human presence over the centuries? What would we face if we could travel into the future in H.G. Wells’ “the time machine”? What would we wish to salvage if we knew that little would survive one day? How can we preserve the essence of life – people, communities and cultures? How can we point out what will eventually be left of us in the distant future, there where the stars of today will shine when their light has travelled for thousands or light years away, and preserve it? Opening up the space for artistic creation to lead us there, to that distant future, through its doubts, ambivalences, rebellions and demands, we welcome the works of this year’s program to our orbital station.
On 23 November, MIR 2023 is launched into the inescapable future.”

Christiana Galanopoulou 
MIR curator/ artistic director