Don’t be disappointed. Don’t be tempted to stay hopeless.This time marks the end of the world we knew, but also the beginning of a new world full of opportunity.
The current health crisis has made clear how precarious our jobs can be, but most importantly how essential our vocation and our passion is to the world. Without art, no one can survive this lockdown; nor can any artist survive not being creative for such a long time.
As artists we live for the constant disruption and questioning of old ideas; we hold in our minds and bodies the privilege of Creation. That is our purpose: To Create. Even when we interpret, we create. These are perilous times but perhaps no more so than a blank page or a blank canvas. Artists don’t shy away from reinvention.
Through our bodies run the energy that transforms intellectual and emotional energy into being. We enable people to connect to that energy. We hold a mirror so they can confront themselves, reckoning with their own humanity and their place in the universe. We remind them that they’re alive and why life is worth living.
We embrace the power of imagination, bringing it forth; one step closer to existence through representation. We tell them stories that will happen in 20, 30, or hundreds of years. We do not just create an immediate reality, we also create the future and we give it meaning.
Throughout history, art has been used to create and heighten the true sense of spirituality, and give meaning to those experiences. How can we leverage that power to unveil the boundless connectivity between nature and ourselves, and also between each other?
Through art, we confront our harshest realities and push through with passionate resilience.
Art is a vehicle for empathy and for solace through the communion of our higher selves.
Empathy, kindness, and generosity are our biggest assets. These three reigning principles also constitute the solution to any problem. Any system, any technology, and any art that has not considered these principles is doomed to fail in its greater purpose: to acknowledge and protect the intrinsic value of everyone and everything that possesses even the most basic level of consciousness.
Empathy, kindness and generosity are not abstract concepts. They are human words, constituting natural and universal principles. Humanity has an outsized power to damage our planet but our potential to save it through cooperation and altruism is likewise unmatched by any other animal.
One could ask how applying these principles would change or mitigate the catastrophes we have lived through and created as humanity during our time on earth. Would have we become a force for social and ecological healing rather than a force for destruction and harm?
Catastrophes, natural or human-made, are events that fundamentally and traumatically change the way things are. This is why we must use this current crisis to create and implement frameworks that address the issues that got us here in the first place.
The French Revolution was entirely a human-caused catastrophe. It also was the catalyst that expanded human rights and liberty through the principles of Enlightenment. Hardly all-inclusive at the time, these principles of human dignity have grown around the world, but have not reached universal implementation.
That’s why we must resolve now that life will not continue to be business-as-usual. We have a choice during this time of transformation: take action in order to make the world we want to live in, or do nothing while others continue to act against our common interest.
The suffering we go through now might have been avoidable. I do not believe that every experience that we live through has meaning, but it is in our power to give it one. The writer Pico Iyer proclaims that “one of the graces of suffering is that it cuts through all ideologies”. It is a great equalizer and a great powerful trigger for cognitive and affective empathy. As an artist, I cannot think of a greater opportunity than to help people give meaning to a total collective experience.
We’ve been forced to pause, to appreciate the beauty of what the world would be if we could give her space to breathe. We’ve been forced to confront ourselves with the devastating sadness of the damage we’ve caused based on ideologies that benefit only the few.
Poverty, racism, gender inequality, and the destruction of our environments stem all from greed and ambition for power.We could solve all of these issues if we wanted to. To begin, we must create cultural shifts.
I see art as the creation of Culture with intent. It is in the change of the zeitgeist that as artists we can embrace the powerful tool of culture in order to bring the advent of those cultural shifts.
The worlds dreamed by Yuval Harari, Steven Pinker, Naomi Klein, Kate Raworth, Mathieu Riccard or Jane Goodall can come to pass if we as artists infiltrate society with representations of these realities. We must help people see that nurturing ecological and social environments is the right, kind, profitable, and revolutionary thing to do.
It is time to sharpen our gaze and our minds. It is the time to bring change to our consciousness, and for consciousness to change. We can focus on the problem by focusing on its solution. We can start by creating. We can also start by sitting in silence and taking it all in. Most of all, we can start by asking questions:
If our systems of production are not working how can we reinvent one that renders the old one obsolete? If we scale it down how can you implement sustainable processes in your practice?
Can we imagine a system that procures wellbeing rather than profit? Or, to start smaller: How can you procure the wellbeing of your colleagues and the people in your artistic community?
How can you foster compassion, empathy, and conflict resolution through your art, education, and processes of collaboration?
I propose we unite in creating positive narratives for the future that the world so direly needs: the beauty and the kindness that counter the suffering we are going through. Eventually a vaccine might solve our current health crisis. Active empathy — for one another and for the natural world — is the antidote for the crises to come.
Inaction is not an option. Empathic creation is our gift and our privilege
ANN TREBOUX CREATIVE DESIGNER/PAINTER 