Attention is attracted by details that stand out and we spontaneously associate with pleasures or dangers. It notices a figure by extracting it from its background. How can we pay attention to the background as such, to the ordinary, to the environment, to the hidden infrastructures of our everyday life? This talk will present "coincidences" as forms of attentional moves which can help us gain a better awareness of the infrastructures that support our everyday life but at the price of threatening the co-habitability of our planet. It will consider how political activism, and artistic experiences can provide a multi-perspectivist sensibility on it. Our capacity to care for vital infrastructures, and to carefully dismantle ecocidal ones, is decisive for our future: either falling-together-in social and environmental collapse or supporting each other in planetary solidarity.

Yves Citton is professor in Literature and Media at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis, co-editor of the journal Multitudes and co-director of the volume Politics of Curiosity. Alternatives to the Attention Economy (Routledge, 2024).