In this third issue of TBQ voices, as a departure point we are asking a question which is also an assertive statement: what do we/I need?! In the singular and the plural, I as a part of a collective. What is necessary to give meaning to my life? What is the gap between I and we? What is the conflict between my happiness and everyone’s happiness? We assume that needs are moved by desire, a kind of daimon that leads us charting a course. To reflect upon this question, we invited theatre/dance artists, a writer, a visual artist and a theologist/minister with whom we had a conversation. The present issue unravels from the central theme of this dialogue that considers existence from a religious point of view (Christian-Catholic), following the sparks of necessities and individual and collective wishes and outlining a community that includes all living beings, not only humans.

Here below is a guide of the themes:

«Sitting at our desks, keeping our quivering bodies at bay, never like now do we have to calm our breathing to make it light and powerful at the same time. In this way we can syncronize it to that of an entire community, like a wonderful united dance that is silhouetted in an image of united force and progress».

«My happiness locates its roots in collective action. My body of artist locates its Gestus losing itself in “Us” and then coming out alone, in a different form, enlivened even after the hardest conflict».

«I don’t want to forget that it’s impossible to live without pity.
I don’t want to be indulgent.
It’s necessary to be strict.
I feel the inability to break away.
To stand out.
I feel the desire to knock down the reserves in which I live.
I don’t want to do it alone.
I feel I need to do it.
We need this».

«I believe the most urgent cultural battle at present is to give a political and conscious function to what we call nature and what we call objects, including the more abstract ones such as machines and concepts. This is the cultural operation I feel is the most necessary and which we need to investigate: how do we give eyes to everything we relate to?».

«Communication as union of life».

«What will reality come to if we don’t succeed in unchaining certain immoral, perverse mechanisms, giving space to the creativity and beauty which surround us»

«Feeding the dream, in order to be more realistic than what is really happening, to prospect a reality that is beyond and superior to the one in front of our eyes.
People are being called to transform their fulfillment in gestures expressing beauty, gestures, actions, movement, making things happen.»

«Everything burns producing a lively and confusing chatter which calls out from the towers/ pyres/organs/suburban landscapes/monumental constructions of powerful buildings/glances from above and below/desire for warmth … everything comes out like a joyful and festive chorus from out of those openings that normally transport sewage, reversing low with high.
“The city is on fire!”. Its habits are burning and with them also the things to forget or to change, in this way the city defines itself as a melting pot of changes that produce ash. Right! Let’s start again from the warm colour of ash, grey welcoming and fertilizing».