« Antidote au culte de la performance : La robustesse du vivant » by Olivier Hamant

On the occasion of Hélène Bertin's exhibition dansetremblenage, La Criée contemporary art centre invites you to join a new arpentage: a collective reading session where we discover a book together by dividing it into as many parts as there are participants. After reading individually, everyone shares the essence of their section with the group - a convivial and collaborative way to circulate ideas!
For this session, we will explore the book Antidote to the Cult of Performance: The Robustness of the Living by Olivier Hamant, French biologist and biophysicist, and research director at the Plant Reproduction and Development Laboratory (RDP) at INRAE.
In this essay, Olivier Hamant invites us to look at life - and especially plants - through a different lens, in order to rethink our culture of performance. Faced with ongoing socio-ecological upheavals, he shows how our current development models - whether driven by over-optimization or hasty technological transitions - may lead us into dead ends. He turns to emerging alternatives such as degrowth and voluntary simplicity, while raising a fundamental question: if we want to build a truly sustainable future, shouldn't we challenge the very idea of efficiency?
What if, to imagine a more robust world, we needed to embrace fragility, welcome uncertainty, and reinvent our ways of doing things - together?