« In Times of Need »
Call to members, Councillors, and friends for the 2023 UNIMA Bali Council
“Lucidity is the wound closest to the sun”(René Char, Feuillet d’Hypnos)
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Dear Presidents, national and international Councillors, members, friends,
The pandemic has paralysed us, wars strike and kill, populations die indiscriminately, and cultures struggle not to succumb to the irreversible and to the state of affairs of the most powerful. Solidarity and human rights mourn a reality that words cannot describe. Is power the demonstration of the right of the strongest? Can the thousands of indiscriminate killings and deliberate cruelty erase all hope of dialogue and creation? Speeches become deaf again, words become weapons to defeat an enemy that has never been so much an enemy as it is a brother, a friend, and the closest relative. But words can never justify the cruelties committed and the murders of the innocent. Missiles will never crush the most basic right to exist and to be different. Humanism is never the humanism of oneself, but rather of the Other! Humanism is precisely the encounter with the Other. Ideology will never be able to undo the idealism of believing that catastrophe and disaster are never ultimate, this idealism of inventing and creating the human link at every encounter.
Unima is facing challenges and we have to find answers. The world is falling apart every moment, and we have to rebuild it every time, to rebuild the sense of being together and to build tomorrow and the new day. Each day is the challenge of that new day. Does this new day look like the day before? Nature supports us to the point of wishing us away. To believe that we can do as before, or to pretend to believe that we can do as before, is to deny the power of tomorrow and the answer. Each of you, as members, advisors, puppeteers, you answer these questions every day, and you carry Unima in your projects as well as in the energy you carry to make Unima shine among your member countries and internationally. Our meetings and gatherings are moments of exchange, dialogue and vision.
The 2023 Bali Council will be crucial to reformulate renewed statutes in the face of these repeated crises since 2019 and this moment that we wished Congress for our Indonesian hosts has become a Council, which will be from now on hybrid, to be able to reach the greatest number of our international members Councillors and centres throughout the world. This council will also be crucial for this return to meetings between us to celebrate the puppetry arts and the friendships of the world’s puppetry cultures.
The 2023 Bali Council will take place from 26 to 30 April 2023. In the next few months, the organisation will set up and open the registrations of all the participants in the framework of the Council and the programme of the proposed activities. You will soon receive the agenda of the Council.
You are already cordially invited to come to the Bali 2023 Council.
Let’s come together again, after Bochum in 2018, in Gianyar, Bali!
Dimitri Jageneau
Secretary General