Sunday 1is December | 4 p.m. | Meeting with the Paris Surrealist Group
Would surrealism already be a hundred years old? ? Aren't our calendars these little white and black stones which mark the passage of our dreams and which together become sometimes a haunted castle and sometimes a barricade ? Their last pages have not yet been delivered to us by the wind of the unpredictable – and certainly they are not likely to appear in the rooms of the Center Pompidou, where, between two paintings by Max Ernst and Toyen, experts in intellectual fraud exercised their meager talents, trying to reduce surrealism to an artistic avant-garde enclosed between two dates: 1924-1969.
A beautiful story is that of this revolutionary movement, and which we know is unfinished, even unfinishable, because each of its moments is rich in a utopian promise capable of helping literally and in every sense to the overthrow of this old world. The dream, the revolt and always the urgency of this first affirmation which angers the morons and delights the goblins and mutinous spirits: the imagination is subversive or it is not.
It is therefore important for all those who know they are rebels against the dominant order to have imagination, always more imagination. It is necessary to escape the labyrinth of instrumental rationality and thwart the traps and seductions of the commodity. It is necessary to seize the liberating potential of language and open prosaic reality to the dimensions of a poem which only asks to be experienced.
And it is necessary for this poem to respond to other rebellious voices who discover the same passions of wanting to invent a world without god or master.
This is why surrealism remains this emancipatory movement which manifests itself today, for example, through the activities of the surrealist group in Paris, visible in particular in its magazine Alcheringa. You are invited to meet some of its members on Sunday 1is December, from 4 p.m., at the Publico bookstore, 145, rue Amelot, Paris.
