Tourte Nicolas

Ice is no longer eternal. The ice of mountain glaciers all over the world is disappearing visibly, just like that of ice floes. On the one hand, scientists are alarmed by the melting of the ice and warn of the harmful consequences that will come very quickly, on the other, governments and companies are opening new exploitation routes, new trade routes through the ice floes, and the North Pole is once again the subject of high-tension geostrategic issues. While we see a world disappearing, the melting of the ice is not without deleterious effects on ecosystems, we are already rushing to conquer its ruins…

We also know the preponderant role that ice floes play on climate balances, in particular on ocean circulation. The reduction of its vast icy tongues will undoubtedly bring its share of disasters that will be added to those in progress..

Everything happens as if our societies, launched into a frantic race for profits and abundance for a few and exploitation and servitude for a large majority, had, probably unconsciously, decided on their ends, their erasures, their disappearances. Thus the foundations on which they rest seem to disintegrate. They melt like snow in the sun.

I also think of Isaac Asimov’s science fiction novel: FOUNDATION. I can’t help but hope that a science, like that of psychohistory, which predicted in the work the fall of the Empire with 25 million inhabited worlds, and which could reduce by its predictions the long period of barbarism that would inevitably follow, estimated at 30,000 years to only 1000 years, by grouping together all the knowledge and knowledge of humanity, could get us out of the impasse in which we are locked.

This is a childhood dream, it goes without saying. I enjoy here confronting his reveries with the harshness of a reality where the representations of the disaster in progress would be advertising, as if they were trying to sell us at the same time a dream world and its brutal end. I imagine the context of this work as if it were installed in a cave, or a cavern. As if she were referring to the staging of Plato’s allegory of the cave. How to base an epistemological reflection on the origins of knowledge and how to make the most of it – that of a humanity freed from its Hybris.