After a summer rich in emotions and discoveries, will CreativeTech promote sobriety, the new mantra of the fall?  When geopolitics joins climate issues to urge us to be sober with energy—the mixed imaginations of reductions, shortages, restrictions, fear of running out are combined with those of the need to innovate, the ability to find solutions, collective and individual reasoned action ….

If the famous Meadows report of 1972 reminds us of the consequences of exponential growth in a finite world, let us not succumb to the fatalistic temptation. At least not just yet. The instinct of art is to help us look at things differently and to lead us along side roads. And with all due respect to Baudelaire, at a time of crisis, it is legitimate to ask the question: is it still time to get drunk?

Sobriety and frugality

• Sobriety (from the Latin word sobrietas) means temperance in the use of wine. A strange use of a word originally associated with wine, with drunkenness. But for a more contemporary meaning, CreativeTech aligns itself with the definition proposed by Eloi Laurent, Researcher at the Observatoire français des Conjonctures économiques):

“The satisfaction of reasoned needs by means of limited resources.”

• Frugality (from the Latin word frugalitas, the gathering of fruit) is positioned as a synonym for sobriety, with perhaps a slight variation: etymologically, there is no notion of tempering anything in frugality, but rather of choosing an alternative.

So, what if we were to be frugal rather than sober?

Remove, reduce, empty. What if we imagined our consumption infrastructures without us? This is what the artist Geoffroy de Crécy, Etienne’s brother, proposed in his animated short film, Empty Places (2020), made before the pandemic and presented during the Némo biennial at the CENTQUATRE Paris, Au-delà du réel? He imagines all the key places in our society (supermarkets, nightclubs, stock markets) without us humans. What is left then? Machines, lonely automatons pulsing a frantic algorithm. Faced with this overflow of too much emptiness, what do we really need?

The Art of being sober: does the future belong to artists?

Imagining, writing, painting, dancing, singing, acting are all artistic practices that make us dream, travel, escape beyond the physical confines of our own home and with our own calories, our inner fire, as our only driving energy. Therefore, could increasing our mastery of the arts be the way to sobriety?  Is this not a formidable program for the future, where culture remains a source of infinitely renewable energy?

Yes, because culture also helps us to question and invent other relationships with the world, with living beings, with our biosphere. Like the astrophysicist and philosopher Aurélien Barrau asked on France Inter, are we dreaming of artists, poets, and philosophers to take control of the Polytechnics? Harmony, harmony, when you hold us.

And what if the first answers were to be found in the Cosmopoetics of Dénétem Touam Bona? In his book, Wisdom of the Lianes (Sagesse des Lianes), the author  invites us to learn many lessons from the know-how and savoir-vivre of lianas, a voluble plant par excellence endowed with a formidable gift for interweaving. Come on, who’s going to come and swing from vine to vine with us?

Invitation to non-travel

“Do you have to travel to be happy?” This is the impertinent question posed by the EDF Group Foundation, which after the exhibition “Fake news: Art, fiction, lies” —of which CreativeTech was co-curator—is taking the opposite view of our desire for distant adventures to stimulate our imaginations in an exhibition that runs until 29 January 2023.

• The question is an irritating one. Or at least, it seems to bother us? Today, we know only too well: sobriety rhymes with a reduced carbon footprint. So, forget the plane and the incessant round trips, and perhaps we should learn to marvel at our surroundings once again. The exhibition presents Richard, Camille Martin, and Marine Ponthieu’s Le Voyage au but du jardin: an almost sociological journey of three days to cycle around their garden to re-learn the fascination of proximity. Sober but intoxicating.

To symbolize the journey into a world in decline, the exhibition also features “Going Nowhere 1.5” by British artist Simon Faithfull, a work showing the artist circling a stretch of sand from the air and then gradually being swallowed up by the sea.

The exhibition explores various themes and, above all, the evolution of our travel customs through various multisensory media. Sisyphus, get out of this body: happiness is within walking distance; “luxury, calm and pleasure”.