Sometimes, there is no need for long journeys or for crossing borders to escape: all it takes is a crack opening up in the order of things, without anyone moving from where they are... Or something along those lines, as Deleuze and Guattari said when they spoke of lines of flight.

We live immersed in haste and hypervisibility; everything must be seen immediately, everything must be shared even before it has been experienced and, amid this constant noise, the only escape begins, paradoxically, by stopping. Walter Benjamin called it the moment of danger: that fragile instant when a memory, an image, presents itself to those who know how to stop and look at it before it disappears forever.

Some escapes make noise, while others remain unseen; some last only an instant, while others last a lifetime. Some set us free, while others, deep down, bind us even more closely to what we are trying to escape from.

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

Analogue photography has always understood this because it is, in itself, a technique of escape. To capture the world, we must step outside it for a moment, stop and wait. The image is already there, latent, hidden within the emulsion, invisible until someone decides to develop it, before anyone else can see it. Developing it in the dark is the only way to escape haste: without a screen, without immediacy, allowing what the world would make instantaneous to endure.

This festival is one of those suspended moments. Twenty proposals. Twenty cracks in the usual order of things. They are not definitive ways out, but they offer room to breathe. They are not answers, perhaps questions...

And we have also chosen a colour (#881E6C)

Each edition has its own, as though we were collecting colours as well as editions. This year called for a deep colour. Elegant and dark, with character, one that neither asks for permission nor needs to shout to make itself heard.

And, as every year, it was not chosen by chance or according to fashion; in a way, it chose us, edition after edition, colour after colour.