Stop saying: “Young people don’t believe in anything any more”;

Say: “Shit! They don’t swallow our lies any more”*.

The countries that are signatories to the agreement reached at the COP21 Climate Change Conference in 2015 understood that there is no planet compatible with globalisation’s hopes for development, and up until now they had drawn plans on the comet**.

Neoglobalidad, like the anarchy of information bubbles served up to us daily, tackles a whole host of questions mixing ecology, immigration, post-truths, gender studies and new technologies, by way of thoughts about power, work, occupation, insurrections, communities, magic, etc. This drifting leads to the proliferation of zones of deviations, integration, interstices, disobedience, reproduction, a complex process of digestion and displacement, a taking into account of the relationships of subjectivity with a multitude of forms of exteriority – whether social, animal, vegetable, cosmic, or indeed in the form of cyborgs.

Pablo Réol tackles the fake nature of the fake with a collection of Photoshop edits. It is a way of responding derisively and poetically to the blurring of facts by today’s politicians or economic players. With his photographic objects Maxime Guyon reveals an aesthetic specific to the new technologies, research and industrial development. Eva and Franco Mattes and the Discipula collective appropriate, analyse and twist the different communication flows, in particular the Internet. They decrypt and re-encrypt the strings of cognitive globalised capitalism. Etienne Chosson and Giacomo Bianchetti extend thinking about the photographic medium as a means of counter-information and occupy physical and political territories such as the Paris spring in 2016, or the 2017 Bilderberg summit in Washington. The way Anaëlle Vanel looks at archival objects allows photography to traverse distant historical territories and periods. She embarks on a painstaking attempt to construct human and political memory. With her film Les courants vagabonds Lola Gonzàles explores a myth telling how, when chaos spreads in the world, at certain critical moments in history, the dead awaken. Finally Stéphanie Probst, Neige Sanchez and Galaxia Wang, each in her/his own way, turn their attention to the portrait genre. All point to the need to build alternative ways of thinking about ourselves both as individuals and as a group, of not submitting, of deepening our perceptions and catching sight of the positive effects of the current fragmentation of the world.

Neoglobalidad draws inspiration from Felix Guatarri’s Ecosophy and takes the form of an organic network. A second offering from Neige Sanchez is mixed in at the heart of this hanging, located on first floor of the Commun, in the form of live radio on 26, 27 and 28 October: The Charmed Club s’occupe du Commun. With readings and discussions, the Charmed Club team will communicate the questions it has about entertainment, interdisciplinarity, communication methods, activism, and the care given to living things in all their interstices. The exhibition thus becomes a place of exchange and a platform for broadcasting with interventions from different groups / collectives / artists / etc.

Carrying on from the visual and political explorations of the 2014 exhibition Against the grain – La photographie à contre-courant at the CPG, Neoglobalidad takes a current observation as its starting point: In the mediatic and political power struggles through and with the image, every information bubble develops in closed circuit. There is no longer either a dominant position or an alternative position. The exhibition brings together works which show forms of editing that twist and mix the various information bubbles available.

The media theorist Wolfgang Ernst observes that “The Internet is not an archive”, it is only a temporary storage facility. The World Wide Web which came into being in 1989 is simply too dynamic and unstable to be regarded as a permanent means of conservation for cultural artefacts. The wandering of information leads to new memory systems, linked to machine time. Physical bodies are redefined by a neo-feudal system that emphasizes the gap between rich and poor, and by ever tighter panoptic arrangements which upset our relationship with the immediate natural and urban environment, as well as with ourselves. The collective exhibition Caméra(Auto)Contrôle held in 2016 at the CPG attempted to figure out the phenomenon.

At the outset, with the appearance of the WWW and the computer, there was the promise of a change in work, a pooling and sharing of knowledge: a bringing together of the capabilities for the production of life, culture, not for consumption as is imposed by neoliberal globalisation, but for community. Alternative globalisation emerged in the 1990s, the 1999 demonstrations in Seattle being the first to be very much mediatised, and in Geneva we remember the 2003 G8 summit at Evian. That media cover allowed a voice to be heard, a voice telling of an ability to carry democracy towards greater transparency, participation and sharing. What happened was a regime of commodification of the entire world after the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the advent of Trumpism, the vanguard of neoliberal climate-change deniers has decided that it would be the rest of the world that paid for their ruination and this turning of the earth against itself. Deregulation is the order of the day at every level while the new climatic conditions have long been sweeping away all frontiers**.

The current reality is that of open warfare between predatoriness and solidarity, a war that is also being waged on the ground of the production and distribution of images. Going from the real to post-truth, the position of the President of the foremost world power who openly accuses the most serious media providers of publishing fake news (history shows that he is not completely wrong, as in the case of the Iraq war based on false evidence) allows us to shed light on a paradigm shift in the hierarchy of the media, and therefore also in the production of fixed and moving images.

Neoglobalidad is one of a sequence of exhibitions devoted to new generations of artists to be staged by the Centre de la photographie de Genève (CPG), such as Quoi de 9/11 photographes de Genève et de la région lémanique in 2002, vfg Prix des Jeunes Talents in 2010, 2009 and 2008, Jeunevois in 2008, or Against the grain - la photographie à contre-courant in 2014. The positions adopted by young Swiss artists are here shown to echo international and historical views. At the same time Linke is presenting his archive of the globalised world with The Appearance of That Which Cannot Be Seen at the CPG.

*Comité Invisible, Maintenant, pub. La fabrique, 2017

** Bruno Latour, L’Europe refuge, in L’Age de la régression, pub. Premier parallèle, 2017

Sébastien Leseigneur, curator of Neoglobalidad exhibition, 2017