Klaxon
Online journal dedicated to the living arts in public spaces
Published by CIFAS, in collaboration with IN SITU, a European network dedicated to artistic creation in the public space, KLAXON has published two issues per year until 2020, in French and English, in PDF, Kindle and e-Book formats.
Publishing director: Benoit Vreux.
Editor in chief: Pascal Le Brun-Cordier.
Editorial Secretary: Céline Estenne.
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Klaxon reflects CIFAS' interest for "living" artistic intervention in the public space, an interest that has taken the form of several urban practice workshops, as well as thematic meetings and workshops within the Urban Academy on Art and the City, extended since 2014 to a series of living artworks presented in the public space under the banner SIGNAL.
New number: Klaxon 13
Taking Action with the Living
How can creation in public space transform not only our representations of the living, but situations, not only our imaginations but the real? In what formats and with what results? Complementing the previous issue, this 13th opus of Klaxon tackles artivist creation aiming at transforming the world by supporting the living.
After laying down five milestones around the history of art action that ravages and revives the living, from Joseph Beuys to iconoclastic debunking, via Reclaim the streets, the Yes Men and Thierry Boutonnier, this issue presents a powerful text that resembles a manifesto by John Jordan and Isabelle Fremeaux, founder of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, focused on the search for an extractivist art to be urgently eradicated in favour of an art of reciprocity and a culture of rebellion. There is no doubt that this electrifying article, illustrated with inspiring examples, will provoke lively debate and accelerate awareness of the meaning of artistic action in times of climate catastrophe.
The following text, "To Act As If We Were Already Free", echoes it. Its author, performance artist Christophe Meierhans, has joined Extinction Rebellion Belgium. He presents his commitment to civil disobedience as a personal challenge, but also as a tangible and direct response to the loss of confidence in the stability of a world that suddenly seems to be falling asunder.
In an interview with Pascal Le Brun-Cordier, Lauranne Germond, founder of COAL Art and Ecology, proposes a fascinating exploration of these new territories of art where aesthetic practices, living studies, ecological activism, individual and collective experimentation, design or ancestral know-how are intertwined.
This issue closes with a rich conversation between the writer Camille de Toledo and Sébastien Thiéry, researcher, author and founder of PERU, Pôle d'Exploration des Ressources Urbaines, where a singular way to think about architecture takes shape, about the city and politics, as well as a certain savoir-faire of how to take action — in order to invent a politics of hospitalities and to expand within the territory the scope of that which we could say ‘yes’ to today.
