Escaping is not always a matter of legs. Sometimes there is no need for long roads or crossed borders: all it takes is the crack that opens in the order of things, without anyone moving from where they are. Something like this is what Deleuze and Guattari meant when they spoke of lines of flight.

We live caught in haste and hypervisibility; everything has to be seen now, everything has to be shared before it has even been lived and, within this constant noise, the only possible escape begins, paradoxically, by stopping. Walter Benjamin called it the moment of danger: that fragile instant when a memory, an image, offers itself to those who know how to stop and look at it before it disappears forever. Closing your eyes in the wrong place. Continuing to look when no one else is looking anymore. Choosing the long way. Remembering what you never lived. Imagining what does not exist.

There are escapes that make noise and others that go unseen; some last an instant and others a lifetime. Some set us free and others, deep down, bind us even more tightly to the very thing we are fleeing from.

Roland Barthes spoke of a “that-has-been” inscribed in every photograph: the proof that something existed before the lens, even if it is no longer there. Perhaps that is why photography is, of all the arts, both the most fleeting and the most stubborn. It fixes forever what was already escaping at the very moment the shutter was pressed.

Analogue photography has always known this, because it is, in itself, a technique of escape. To capture the world, one must step out of it for an instant, stop, wait. The image is already there, latent, hidden in the emulsion, invisible until someone decides to reveal it, before anyone can see it. Revealing it in the dark is the only way to escape haste: without a screen, without immediacy, making last what the world would rather make instant.

This festival is one of those suspended moments. Twenty proposals. Twenty cracks in the usual order of things. They are not definitive exits, but breaths of air. They are not answers, perhaps questions...

And you... where do you go, when you escape?