Nuit des Idées 2023

To ask the question “more?” is to question the constraints we face in the Anthropocene era, with the need, in many areas, to do more with less. The idea of an “inversion of the poles”, which would take up the Less is more mantra of the masters of the Bauhaus movement, can be frightening (degrowth, great resignation…). But this dialectic of plus and minus allows us to invoke new imaginaries of progress, no longer solely in a search for productivity and efficiency, but in a quest for meaning, an urgency to (re)build the link with the living.

The health crisis seems to have amplified a movement that began well before 2020 and is based on two questions specific to post-industrial societies: what is the meaning of my work, how can I regain control of my life? What to do with my life? The inability to grasp the working of machines, the obsolescence of jobs we still train for, the blurring of boundaries between professional and private life and the necessity to halt climate breakdown are all causes of the upheaval that is transforming our relationship to time and work.

The Nuit des Idées 2023 in Amsterdam will focus on the way in which mankind can seize future opportunities, including technological ones, to regain control of its destiny. Should we always try to go “faster” – although the faster we go, the less time we have! – or can we try to redefine our relationship with time? How can we combine our relationship with work and technology in a “culture of the living”, particularly through the movement to “renaturate cities” and the creation of intermediate spaces (third places, fablabs, makersplaces, etc.) that enable us to make different human activities cohabit in a more harmonious way and generate social links?

Margot Dijkgraaf (moderator)
Lynn Berger
Jan Willem Duyvendak
Camille Etienne
Lena Hartog
Céline Marty
Olga Mink
Timothée Parrique
Stephan Petermann
Agnès Sinai