Breda Photo Festival 2022
“Another world is not only possible, it is on its way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing.”
This was written by the Indian writer Arundhati Roy in 2005. In April 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, she published the article ‘The pandemic is a portal’. In it she says: “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”
With the choice of ‘Theatre of Dreams’ as its theme for 2022, BredaPhoto asks its artists to confront the familiar rhetoric and visual language that the current world order continuously keeps in circulation. A radical art practice works on the powerful presentation of a visual language for the future, in which hope is characterized by fundamental change.Surrounded by the catastrophes and the massive upheaval caused by the corona crisis, BredaPhoto goes along with Roy’s hopeful desire. If real structural problems existed before the outbreak of the pandemic, then this is an opportunity to correct things.
Last year, amid the pandemic, the French theorist Bruno Latour wrote: “If common sense asks us to ‘restart production as soon as possible, we must yell back: ‘absolutely not!’ The last thing we should do is to repeat exactly what we’ve done before”.For Arundhati Roy, the importance of such a reckoning is crucial and inevitable:” Historically, pandemics have forced people to break with the past and re-imagine their world again. This one is no different. It’s a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
