COAL Prize 2024 - BEING TRANSFORMATIVE

At a time when knowledge alone is no longer enough to motivate action, the Prix COAL 2024 calls for transformation from within, of the senses, of care, of the self with others. It’s a call to see culture as the breeding ground for our relationship with nature and, by the same token, our greatest asset in bringing about radical, sustainable change.

Everything transforms, as the saying goes: chrysalis into butterfly, carbon into oil, solar energy into organic matter, seed into plant, dead matter into compost, winter into spring. Everything is transformed so that everything remains. However, by inventing ourselves as “masters and possessors”, the human race has set about this transformation to the point of distorting its principles. It has broken the natural cycles and cut into the fabric of life to the rhythm of a hyper-transformation inscribed indefinitely into the geological strata. Today, the consequences of these disruptions are prompting us to embark on another transformation, this time no longer outside us but within us, as close as possible to our ways of acting and living, of living and thinking, in order to make peace with the Earth.

In this quest, the artist once again appears as the pathfinder of these peaceful transformations, the one who gives form to matter and materiality to forms, the one who does not conform but informs and transforms with respect. These Transformative Artistic Practices exist and are emerging like swarms. Stemming from collective and participatory processes, but experienced in an intimate and situational way, they instigate changes that are inseparably individual and communal, with others both human and non-human, by trusting in the potential of experience in all its dimensions. Transdisciplinary by nature, they bring together and reinvent uses that know no age or frontiers, whether they be artisanal, culinary, gardening, ritual, spiritual, poetic, dreamlike, somatic, festive, militant, performative, subversive or legal, organisational, relational, administrative, logistical…

Through their exploratory approaches, these Practices embrace the radical uncertainty of a changing world, the better to distance themselves from the principles laid down by a tendency towards techno-solutionism. They invite situated knowledge rather than expert knowledge, and provide experiential support for evolving capacities rather than imposing changes in behaviour. They transform in the literal sense, by creating forms that can be appropriated by others to give everyone back the desire and the power to act.

To bring together these fundamental upheavals, the COAL 2024 Prize is calling on artists who are developing restorative practices, individually or in groups; approaches that reconnect us somatically, sensorially and spiritually; know-how of the hand and of the earth; often in atypical and non-institutional cultural venues, veritable open-air laboratories, fields in which to experiment with tangible and realistic ecotopias for better living together. By cultivating resistance and resilience in the face of the Great Transformation of the world, artists are not only agents of change but are giving us the power to embody it, and thus respond to Gandhi’s call: “Be the change you want to see in the world”.