Désastronautes

A poem, six paperclips, a typewriter, a tuba. And this question: how to learn to navigate the ongoing disaster?

For their first collaboration, poet Thierry Raboud and composer Victor Decamp combine their questions about the place of creation in a failing ecosystem to create an original literary performance. A dialogue between two languages, that of the spoken and that of the unspeakable, to invent together, with a lucidity that does not relinquish hope, the texture of the world to come.

The text - Thierry Raboud (Leenaards Foundation cultural grant recipient)

The poem "Disastronauts" aims to give form and words to the chasm that opens up beneath the footsteps of humanity on the move.

For a chasm has opened within us and before us, the chasm that separates acquiescence to catastrophic evidence from its nonchalant avoidance, dramatic foresight from blind indifference. Yes, a rift both intimate and collective, between what we know (thanks to the IPCC) and what we do (thanks to extractive capitalism). Faced with the difficulty of reconciling urgency with indifference and lucidity with living, the temptation is great to

We stop by the roadside to admire the beautiful colors of the fire. Yet we must move forward nonetheless, divided but tenacious, paradoxical but hopeful, and find a possible path together. In short, we must become explorers of the unfolding disaster. We must become de-astronauts.

By staging the "we," whose disempowering neutrality is the true cause of ecocide, and then by tearing apart the very form of the poem to represent the two sides of the contemporary divide, the poet gives voice to the contradictions of his time while attempting to give way to the destiny of his generation.