Manif d'art 11 - Québec City's biennial event will draw inspiration from the Canadian winter and the earth's sleep to explore human sleep and the many nuances of wakefulness. Moments of latency, transition and pause, the cold season and sleep have in common that they suspend productivity and resist the principles of exploitation of bodies and resources. The regeneration of living organisms depends on these daily or seasonal alternations, when different species and their environment can enter into correspondence, and also on listening and paying attention to self-knowledge and interactions with other forms of life. Because it releases uncontrolled and sometimes decisive inner forces, alters our reflexes and modifies our perceptions, sleep has the capacity to modify our apprehension of the world.

The biological rhythms of activity and rest have a social and political history - the duration and structure of sleep have been marked by successive norms. Since the industrial era, sleep has been a political issue because it makes us idle, as demonstrated by capitalism's efforts to ensure that profit and efficiency reign day and night. Modernity wants the body to be "recycled" by night. The contemporary world cultivates and exploits the ideology of sleep disorders. Meanwhile, the world's poorest people sleep in the open air of the world's metropolises.

Exhibitions are situations of awakening, fostering multiple regimes of attention. Artistic processes can provoke astonishment, encounters and unforeseen encounters, encouraging the recomposition of our perceptions, our certainties and the hierarchies that govern us. The itinerary will evoke fruitful places of entrenchment, such as bedrooms and beds, where we abandon ourselves and reclaim ourselves; houses and burrows, where we take shelter and find others; hideaways and retreats conducive to situations of resistance and observation; projection rooms. We'll also look at how to get through the extreme cold and the prodigious plant-based strategies for survival.

Vigils, meditations, brief ramblings - partial slumbers irrigate our days and offer us times of shifted perceptions, discordant thoughts, the latency of our judgments. Artists remind us that these moments are strengths. They will grow our ways of living and cohabiting on a planet of which we are neither the owners nor the sole subjects.
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