Mechanics - Julien Beautemps

“It may be that we, earthly creatures who have started to act as inhabitants of the universe, will never again be able to understand […] the things that we are able to do. In any case everything would happen as if our brain […] could no longer follow what we are doing, so that from now we really need machines to think and speak for us." Hannah Arendt, prologue to The Human Condition (1958).

Like a prophecy, the philosopher Hannah Arendt predicts the fall of man enslaved to technical progress and consumption. With an unprecedented hurry to flee from its "creature" condition (in the biological sense), modern man has forgotten its earthly reality to isolate itself in its interiority and get lost into selfish desires and impulses. Today only the ego counts in a world where man is confronted with processes that leaves him behind. The unbridled race for consumption brutifies it and makes its mind become a virtual entity. It is this mechanism of dehumanization I wanted to describe through four different ways of painting the complex picture of modernity.

For accordion

Duration: 19'