On the silent voice of the world.

Aliocha Imhoff and Kantuta Quirós, art theorists and curators, present their latest book Qui parle? pour les non-humains (PUF, Collections perspectives critiques, 2022) in dialogue with Alain Berland.

In the 1970s, when the question "who is speaking?" was asked, a theatrical stage was opened that invited questions about identity politics, the legitimacy of forms of authority, representative institutions, science and its procedures, and even the history of cinema or literature. But today, in the age of the Anthropocene, the silent voice of the world has caught up with humans. "Who is speaking?" would ask to enlarge the stage of knowledge and politics to all those who, because they did not have the word, could not be included - animals, plants, objects or machines.

Aliocha Imhoff and Kantuta Quirós answer this question with a manifesto for a politics of silence that is also a cartography of its possible means: that of the processes of translation, of the new forms of citizenship, of eco-diplomacy, of attention or of spokesmanship with which activists, artists and thinkers seek to give a voice to what has none.

Curators, art theorists, filmmakers, Kantuta Quirós and Alyosha Imhoff are the founders of the curatorial platform "the people who miss", created in 2005, which works between art and research. For several years they have been conducting a research project aimed at a new ecology of knowledge based on scenographies of contemporary thought (diplomatic fictions, fictitious trials, assemblies and thought experiments on a scale of 1).

Winners of the 2021 Fluxus Arts Project, they are the artistic directors of the cross-Channel festival of contemporary creation and ideas Diep Haven (FR/UK).  Members of the editorial board of the journal Multitudes, they have been residents of the Rebuild Foundation (Chicago South Side, 2015) and the Ateliers Médicis (2018). They are currently presenting a monographic exhibition at the Royan Art Center. Kantuta Quirós teaches art theory at the Ecole Européenne Supérieure d'Art de Bretagne (Rennes site). Aliocha Imhoff is a lecturer at the University of Paris VIII, visual arts department.

Penser le présent is produced with the support of Société Générale.

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