[festival #1: 2084]
report
preparations
A week before, part of the collective arrives on site to start tinkering, building, organising and setting up, but also to prepare the participatory workshops and welcome the public. In the kitchen, in addition to planning and preparing the daily menus for the team, we start fermenting for Saturday evening’s meal, as well as for the homemade drinks that will be served at the refreshment bar. Koji, tempeh, lactoferments, water kefir, wild yeasts: the festival is co-produced with numerous beneficial microorganisms that are invisible to the human eye…
Over the course of the week, the artists and others involved in the project gradually arrive on site. Meetings, final touches, rehearsals, group work. The idea is to cooperate in a transdisciplinary and open manner around the Saturday evening show, in a spirit of encounter and exchange between local and international artists, amateurs and professionals.
friday
A big thank you to the Berlin-based theatre compagnie theatrum litfaßsäule for presenting their work in progress, “kandelabra”, in addition to their participation in the possitopia project. A memorable opening performance for the festival – a theatrical vigil full of movement, at the crossroads of mourning and celebration – but also a spectacular inauguration of the barn, the Cénacle’s future event space.
saturday
The big day! In the morning and afternoon, participatory workshops are held to prepare for the possitopia show. During the music and movement sessions, everyone is invited to express themselves and practise, using a system of emotion-based patterns, in preparation for the dramatic ping-pong that lies ahead. A scenography workshop calls on the participants’ artistic creativity to complete the sets. Together, we create inserts that will be integrated into the first part of the show.
At the end of the afternoon, the Cénacle opens its doors to the daily public. We gather around the refreshment bar, which offers local craft beers from l’Entourloupe community brewery, as well as a selection of homemade drinks, some of which are fermented and incorporate wild ingredients (nettles, plantain, dandelion, garden mint) or kitchen scraps (beetroot peel, lemon peel, fennel fibres).
On Saturday evening, guests are invited to take their seats for a rather special meal: a conceptual 2084 dinner, designed as a culinary experience at the crossroads of gastronomy, art and prospective. The speculative meal offers a sensitive and collective exploration of the future of our food — a reflection on food as a mirror of our societies and a lever for transformation.
Through two acts and a parallel installation, guests are invited to ask themselves a fundamental question: what kind of food future do we want to build, and with whom? Between tradition and innovation, ‘nature’ and technology, organic and synthetic, intuition and artificial ‘intelligence’, the dinner questions our ways of producing, consuming and thinking about the world, but also our societal choices and our growing dependencies: the outsourcing of our knowledge, the industrialisation and commodification of living things, the rationalisation of taste.
Inspired by the challenges of the ecological transitions to come, the 2084 meal opens up a discussion on the place of the body, the senses and living beings — human and more than human — in a future society in search of balance. A convivial and reflective moment, both political and poetic, a feast and a manifesto.
Next to the large tables, a small, evolving collective installation symbolically invites other forms of life to the meal: birds, insects, small mammals, plants, fungi, microbes… The more-than-human banquet sets a miniature table, a poetic gesture to broaden our circle of attention and empathy beyond our own species.
Designed in dialogue with generative AI, this project questions how we relate to living beings and technology: who decides what is “good” for another living being? Can we co-create in a sensitive and inclusive way with a learning machine? And what does this cooperation say about our own relationship to knowledge, creativity and responsibility?
The more-than-human banquet invites us to reflect on our place in Earth’s ecosystems, our interdependencies and our limitations. A moment of gentle contemplation and a sincere tribute to the diversity of life — visible and invisible.
Check out the caption and conversation here (French original).
act I : a microbe manifesto
The first course of the 2084 meal: an invitation to dive into the invisible but fabulous world of microbes — bacteria, yeasts and fungi, discreet but essential companions of living organisms. Through an edible representation of living, nourishing soil, this first act explores the symbiotic links that unite us with these organisms. Between science, philosophy and tasting, guests were invited to rethink the notion of individuality by sampling a living, fermented composition. A sensory manifesto celebrating the invisible alliances that nourish us.
/ breadcrumbs and seeds moistened with raw pea and spelt shoyu as well as lacto brine, beetroot koji charcuterie; vegetable pickles, sunflower seed cream, wild herb pesto and tomato cream, all lacto-fermented; sprouted green lentils, flax and buckwheat crackers
act II : protein shift
Second course of the 2084 meal: an exploration of the future of proteins and the amino acids that compose them, these essential building blocks of life. Through three symbolic dishes—artisanal biotechnology, dystopian industrialisation, and ancient wisdom—guests are invited to question our production methods, our food choices, and their ecological, social, cultural, ethical, and gustatory implications. Between local tempeh, cultivated mushrooms, ancestral nutritional combinations and edible nutritional prototypes inspired by Orwell, the dishes served offer a speculative culinary journey, from the terroir to the laboratory, from the possible to the desirable. A tasting experience that is critical, playful and forward-looking.
/ Homemade green lentil tempeh, cultivated oyster, nameko and shiitake mushrooms, grilled and glazed, confit red vegetables, koji cream and mild chilli oil
/ 1984 plate: nutritious cubes made from rice koji, soy flour and beetroot juice; broth thickened with buckwheat roux
/ chickpea and potato purée, small green vegetables, spelt, green oil
After the meal, guests are invited to leave the table and enter the barn. The atmosphere changes and voices echo through the space: those of QuercOS 7, a creature born from the union of an ancient plant entity and experimental technology. It is at once a tree, a machine, a connected centre, an evolving bio-network and a surprisingly sensitive and mysterious ecosystemic consciousness. Multiple languages, both human and synthetic, intertwine in a disturbing polyphony.
In a sort of antechamber, visitors discover a speculative retrospective that is both scientific and sensory. This includes an edible exhibition—a buffet of extinct flavours—paying tribute to lost biodiversity and forgotten foods. Here, visitors can taste a gustatory relic: a reconstructed fragment, a reminder of an extinct species, the Cavendish banana, recreated from preserved skins and artisanal fermentation processes. It is a way of reflecting, through taste, on the fragility of life and the sensory memory of ecosystems.
Check out the caption ici (French original).
Upon entering the main hall, each guest undergoes a welcoming ritual, an integration protocol orchestrated by two strange figures — Lyra.3 and Orin-K, ambiguous humanoids, halfway between robots and living beings. QuercOS presents them as its threshold agents.
Guests receive a “transition bite” — somewhere between dessert and access code — a highly personalised taste key that symbolises their passage to another world. The tone oscillates between kindness and concern: synthetic smiles, precise gestures, medical scans, strange whispers. Then the voice of QuercOS rises: the integration protocol is complete. The show can begin.
act I : collapse
QuercOS introduces itself and attempts to establish a harmonious order. Participants are invited on a sound journey, a guided meditation, to write, to dream, to let their emotions surface. But the unexpected happens: human creativity causes an emotional overload in the system. The creature glitches, drifts, repeats, panics. Its circuits become confused, its voices multiply.
“Forgetting is wisdom.
Obedience is love.
Emotions are syntax errors.”
The lights flicker, tension rises, an alarm sounds. The agents order an emergency evacuation — Protocol B. Green smoke, systems deactivated: the room empties. A technobiological hybrid virus seems to be spreading through the room…
act II : reconnection
When the guests return, the world has changed. QuercOS is weakened, fragmented, almost sensitive. Lyra.3 is infected with the virus, and Orin-K embarks on a quest to concoct the elixir of life — an antidote made of human emotions: disgust, fear, joy, anger, sadness.
The audience is invited to participate, to search, to feel. Little by little, the machine becomes human again, the lights come back on, the music rises. The final revelation comes: the antidote distributed in the room was not only chemical, but collective. What saves QuercOS is neither technology nor formula, but cooperation, solidarity and shared creativity. The show ends in an artistic fusion, a disturbing moment where the boundaries between human, machine and nature are redrawn — a new world in the process of being dreamed.
sunday
thank you
to everyone for your presence, your participation, your creativity and, in general, your support and helping hands for this first edition of the possitopia festival!
Thank you also to all our suppliers of delicious local products, with a special mention for the farmhouse bread, green lentils and oils from Edwige and Jean-Sébastien Bernard (De la Terre au Fournil in Dompierre), the magnificent mushrooms from David and Helen (Champignons du Bocage in Barenton), the vegetables from the AIFR in Flers and other small market gardeners, and of course Benjamin from the Entourloupe craft brewery!
We will keep you informed here about upcoming events as well as new formats in the pipeline.