For its 17th edition, titled Sensing Nature, MOMENTA Biennale de l’image humbly invites us to consider environmental justice and its intersections with social justice as a matter of sensing and feeling as much as of analysis and grassroots activism. Although science is urgently needed—not least to tackle the climate emergency—our planetary assembly of multiplicities also craves forms of knowing, feeling, and doing that create different arrangements of coexistence.

A longing for togetherness—for love—echoes insistently in the exhibitions, inviting us to fathom other possible forms of world-making. The artists and authors invite us to forge intimate kinships with nonhuman life-worlds. They propose that we listen to—and observe, smell, touch, speak to—the land, the water, the air not with the aim of distantly understanding, grasping, or exploiting, but to resonate, to vibrate, to be together. Or, perhaps, with no aim at all. Their works and their writing make room for stories that dwell in the blurred boundaries between technology and ancestral wisdoms, weaving in both human and nonhuman modes of knowing. They celebrate that we are in relation with nature, that we are of nature.

MOMENTA x VOX | Wet Futures
This group exhibition is dedicated to the connective spaces between land and ocean. The artists propose embodied forms of being with nature. Here, they attend to human relations with microscopic algae and with enormous marine mammals; there, they behold water and ice as material witnesses to climate change. They consider the atrocities of the Atlantic slave trade and contemporary migrations unfurling across the surface of the oceans, while saluting the concealing obscurity granted by water. Like the multiple bodies of a coral, this exhibition highlights our relationality with others. It suggests that our futures are wet; they are oceanic.