We are living in a time when thresholds are becoming increasingly fragile: these include climate, social, and political thresholds among many others. Such fracture lines reveal the vulnerability of our world, but also the possibility to reconstruct it. A threshold is never a static place: it indicates both a limit and a potential opening, a space where materials, ideas, and bodies meet and transform. The fragility of thresholds becomes a poetic and political resource, a field of exploration for a programming that proposes to inhabit these shifting zones.

In the 2025–26 programming, this fragility of thresholds takes many forms. It exists in devices sensitive to the elements, whose wear and tear and precariousness become the conditions of a fragile splendor or in static objects set in motion and activated by light and sheltered sounds. Fragility can also be heard on the side of a road where lives erased by urban planning persevere, as well as in a grating mechanical repetition, suspended between suppression and fluctuation. It is expressed in a prolonged, multiplied, and fractured voice that makes unstable passages resonate. Lastly, fragility lodges itself in silence, understood not as an emptiness but as a space of listening and an appeal to the other.

Exploring the fragility of thresholds means agreeing to stand in these intermediate spaces where nothing is fixed. It means recognizing the value of wear and tear, care, transformation, and absence as creative forces. Stability does not take precedence but rather the ability to generate new forms of understanding, open up zones of attention and listening. In this programming, fragility does not appear as a weakness but as a strength: the strength to (re)invent, even across fractures, spaces of resonance and mutation.

Building on the previous programming, which explored the concept of passages, the fragility of thresholds is imagined as a metaphor, opening spaces in which the sonic, the visual, and the corporeal are activated with sensitivity, revealing what is being invented through vulnerability, wear and tear, and transformation.

Fragile Thresholds is an initiative by Myriam Lambert,artistic director at Avatar from 2019 to 2025