Poetic/Political per Alys

a -"Poetic licence functions like a hiatus in the atrophy of a social, political, military or economic crisis. Through the gratuity or the absurdity of the poetic act, art provokes a moment of suspension of meaning, a brief sensation of senselessness that reveal the absurdity of the situation and, through this act of transgression, makes you step back or step out and revise your prior assumptions about this reality. And when the poetic operation manages to provoke the sudden loss of self that itself allows a distancing from the immediate situation, then poetics might have the potential to open up a political thought."

b- "What I try to do really is to spread stories, to generate situations that can provoke through their experience a sudden unexpected distancing from the immediate situation and can shake up your assumption about the ways things are, that can destabilize and open up, for just an instant -in a flash- a different vision of the situation, as if from the inside."

c - "I think the artist can intervene by provoking a situation in which you suddenly step out of everyday life and start looking at things again from a different perspective - even if it is just for an instant. That may be the artist's privilege, and that's where his field of intervention differs from that of an NGO or local journalist."

"Can those kinds of artistic acts bring about the possibility of change? In any case, how can art remain politically significant without assuming a doctrinal standpoint or aspiring to become social activism?"

from: p.38-39, catalogue of the show "A story of deception", F.Alys