Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Etienne 2015

HYPERVITAL Saying and doing... finding the perfect harmony, the right balance and measure. We are in a period of great creativity, of inventions and intense production, but also of conflicts and shortages that are reorganising the world. We need to build a pragmatic future just as we need to dream the possible based on stark realities and naked truths. The edification of beauty in a world is as much about the truth of beauty as it is about the beauty of truth. The Hypervital exhibition thus develops an aesthetics of unveiling through the experiencing of truth as the vital bedrock of our imagination. We must deconstruct the models of acceptance and opposition and bring together as many minds as possible ready to shape an architecture of new thought to design tomorrow's world. This exhibition has grown out of a reflection linked to the publication of an article in the Guardian reporting on a NASA-funded study carried out by mathematician Safa Motesharrei and a team of social scientists. The media shockwave it generated referred to the series of factors that will inevitably lead to a change of civilisation if we do not change any of our behaviours. The report entitled Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY): Modeling Inequality and Use of Resources in the Collapse or Sustainability of Societies insists on a multitude of criteria to which we now more than ever need to find a response. It is up to us as designers to contribute to the development of scenarios that can build a revival and be vectors of a Happy End. To avoid fatalism of all kinds and unrestrained gloom-mongering, it is time to let go of the certainties and models in which our world is steeped and reconnect with humanity and nature. «Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no-one thinks of changing himself» (Leon Tolstoy). Considering design as a language with an aesthetics endowed with meaning, a depository of a system that is at once mathematical and poetic, we have a duty to reconcile our gestures and our practices with our existence. We must improve the real world and evoke fictions of a renaissance. Hypervital is thus built on the analysis of a world in crisis, being shaken up by its own practices, its discoveries, its ideals and its failings.