Énergies Désespoirs. Un monde à réparer (“Energies Despairs. A world to repair”) is the catalogue of the eponymous exhibition initiated and designed by Encore Heureux Architectes and the École Urbaine de Lyon, installed at the Centquatre-Paris from May to August 2021.
The exhibition explores two opposing sides of our contemporary planet:
— The crisis of the Earth’s habitability revealed by more and more signs and documented by science;
— The initiatives, at different scales, which testify to the possible repair of this world damaged by the impact of human activities.
The book, like the exhibition, puts in tension the despair that arises from the observation of environmental damage and the energy that comes from experimenting with ecological reorientation of our ways of living. It includes a text by José-Manuel Gonçalvès, a preface by Jean-Christophe Bailly, an interview with the curatorial team and a set of 120 large-format paintings by the artist Bonnefrite. This work, as a vector of an engaged imagination, seeks to transmit a direct emotion, but also a collective thought.
In order to open up the reflection undertaken in the exhibition and to deepen certain issues raised, the book also includes the answers of fifteen personalities to the question “What is your despair? What is your energy?” and the republication of five articles from the daily online newspaper AOC.