130 had decided to deprive Hagía Sophia, a former Byzantine cathedral, of its status as a museum and to convert it back into a mosque. From then on, Christian icons were to be covered during Islamic prayers. I recalled the moment I first visited that space, almost ten years before that. Alongside the soon to be covered Christian images, flanked by monumental Arabic calligraphic medallions, one could have found the seraphim, to me the most magnificent of all angels. How beautiful this unity: the seraphim from the Jewish scriptures, the Christian iconography and the Islamic medallions. They all shared the same space. That place, that melting pot of religions and cultures, that Byzantine monument, seamlessly merged with the minarets that were built much later, accessible to all, was for me a testimony to universal, deeply human desires. Desires that unite us all. To read that Hagía Sophia was showing blind spots felt like a painful denial of that alliance». But there is a moment when contrast needs to manifest itself as such, in the demand for change of a worn-out status quo: this is what happens in the public space as a square, where people go to express their dissent. In a fulfilled democracy, respect for dissent should be is a right, respect for which is enshrined in the principle of free expression of thought and freedom of assembly. In a fulfilled democracy, the handling of dissent should be is mature and appropriate. In a fulfilled democracy, when the anger born of dissent is channelled into symbolic, non-violent actions, the government should know must know how to listen to it, as civil disobedience teaches and as narrated in Why we fight?, a 2022 documentary by Alain Platel and another soulmate of hers, photographer Mirjam Devriendt, in which De Bruyckere herself participated by talking about the lesson of universal respect in her anti-art. For a fulfilled democracy is, without strikethrough conditionals, the land of respect. But the constatation that in the present everything burns is paradigmatic of the fact that democracy is not a proclamation which is sufficient to put in the Constitutions for it to be said to have been achieved, but rather a body to be respected and protected, it too, every single day. The constatation that in the present everything burns – like the title of Motus' illuminating play from 2021, the synopsis of which says «In the actual Anthropocene era we can fight for the rights of our bodies, but the body has its own inescapable public dimension» – is paradigmatic of the fact that the anthropocentric paradigm has failed, as the equally illuminating group show Die intelligenz der pflanzen, at the FKV in Frankfurt in 2021-2022, in which a paradigm of interdependence and mutual aid such as that always implemented by plants was proposed – starting from the assumptions of plant neurobiology by the scientist Stefano Mancuso and the observations on mixture as respect for biodiversity by the philosopher Emanuele Coccia – setting aside progress to favour development, as Pier Paolo Pasolini taught; or, applied to economics, setting aside growth to favour prosperity, as Kate Raworth teaches. Berlinde De Bruyckere participated in the group show with her installation Embalmed Twins I and II (2017), two centuries-old oak trees grown up together, life companions, and fallen victim to Hurricane Kyrill in 2016, reborn in her artistic gesture. A group show like that was based on respect for art and science as pillars in the reconstruction of a new paradigm, the ecocentric one, based on respect for the environment. However, the only ones who seem to have an urgency for a necessary paradigm shift – and the only ones who seem to have an awareness of art as a driving force for change – are the young, who however often handle all this with the rage of dissent and the clamour of the gesture, aware that they belong to the society of the
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