Artists

More and more artists and cultural actors are contributing to sustainably re-integrating artistic practices into the dynamics of ecological transformation in society. These transformative artistic practices, inherently transdisciplinary, interact with and reinvent practices from a wide variety of origins and domains: artisanal, culinary, gardening, ritual, spiritual, poetic, dreamlike, somatic, festive, activist, performative, subversive, revolutionary… but also legal, organizational, relational, graphic, administrative, logistical practices, and more. They vary the registers, modes of attention, and ways of involving other entities to reconfigure how we inhabit the Earth. They adopt an exploratory approach and embrace the radical uncertainty of a changing planet, distinguishing themselves from the solutionism of the technocratic approaches favored by existing policies. These practices induce joint transformations that generate situated knowledge rather than transportable and globalizable expert knowledge. They do not aim to produce behavioral changes but to develop evolutionary capacities within collectives through shared experiences. Thus, artists create forms that can be appropriated by others to restore everyone’s desire and power to act.

As part of Transformative Territories, a call for projects has been launched to artists as part of a special edition of the COAL Prize 2024 dedicated to transformative artistic practices. Out of nearly 800 applications received, about a hundred are presented here, creating an observatory of these new practices on a European scale and allowing cultural actors to identify artists and projects in a still little-known creative field, as well as to better identify their needs for development and support. The selection of artists will be announced in the summer of 2024. The awarding of the Prize and a European study day dedicated to the understanding and dissemination of these practices will greatly publicize these European artists and promote the circulation of their works in November.