Open and compassionate call to combat life's precarity and unpredictability, beautifully illustrated with a series of drawings.
In a competitive, mean, neo-liberal existence we hide our weak spots. When something comes too close, threatens to touch us, we conceal our vulnerability. However, this privatisation of the self means there is less and less opportunity for connection, exchange and joy. All this sheltering keeps you from touching. And from being touched.
Pascal Gielen warmly advocates the ability to experience, through all our senses, a ramshackle and fragile reality and still see it as a coherent whole. Art, theatre, dance, or music can touch us deeply and unexpectedly, show us new connections, and change rigid opinions. That is the power of art and culture: to reconcile us with life, which can be turbulent, disjointed, and fragile.
Written by Marlies De Munck en Pascal Gielen. Drawings and design by Lotte Schroder.
2022, Paperback, 64 pages. 16,7 x 11,5 cm (h x w).