Klaxon

After Klaxon, Cifas is launching a new magazine! The Revue Feral is a continuation of the Feral festival. For the 2022 edition, Brussels-based artist Céline Estenne has kept track of the various exchanges that marked the festival. She takes us on a sensitive journey, to the rhythm of the direct words of the speakers and her own impressions. Like the festival itself, these personalised annals are an invitation to return, again and again, to the role that living art can play in the making of the city, in connection with the rural world, in support of fairer, more generative ecologies of life and work...

How can creation in public space transform not only our representations of the living, but situations, not only our imaginations but the real? In what formats and with what results? Complementing the previous issue, this 13th opus of Klaxon tackles artivist creation aiming at transforming the world by supporting the living.

Because the imaginary is not "a smoke or a sweet dream" but "what bridges the action" (Damasio), because it is urgent to reconfigure our imaginaries of the living, Klaxon dedicates this issue to artists concerned with working on the "recomposition of the world".

By claiming to have a plural approach to urban spaces, artists stand out from the approaches deployed by professionals who are traditionally in charge of transforming the built environment, whether they are urban planners, engineers or architects. This issue of Klaxon is devoted to what will be called the "factory of urbanity".

Performing art in public space is undeniably consensual, for it operates in shared space. At a time, however, when the institutionally preferred modus vivendi is to claim consensus in order to avoid being challenged, it strikes us as critical that artists not forget the vital role that disagreement, and even conflict, plays in democracy.

For some years now, we have been witnessing the "singular" resurrection of ideas of sharing, the principles of pooling as well as collective actions and the reinvention of community rules. But, as the American philosopher Judith Butler has underlined, whenever people come together in public space, it is often to demonstrate about the fact that they are being deprived access to it, or that their rights have been flouted or threatened: hence, these gathering are at once an expression of resistance and a sign of vulnerability.

Nowadays, public space is no longer limited to streets, squares, or even “public” buildings, but also comprises the Web, digital exchanges, as well as technological prostheses that steer and find us. Klaxon’s 8th edition zeroes in on this proximity between the digital world and the physical world—specifically in the urban sphere.

Confronted with terror, what can art do? “Care” was one of the options explored, here by Joan Tronto. This issue also echoes artistic approaches that focus on interactive forms in society in the interest of the other, integrating the notion of care—without yielding to sentimentality in any form.

In this fifth issue, we question the place of the excluded body in city neighbourhoods, those alienated bodies rejected by cultural or social practices due to their perceived strangeness and difference.

The second issue of Klaxon observes this particular place where Art in Public Space adjoins or even becomes political activism.

Klaxon 3 directly addresses those artistic practices that endeavour to redefine the lines drawn in our cities.

The first issue of Klaxon focuses on living art in the city from a societal perspective.