Léa Bismuth offers a meditation at the crossroads of contemporary art history, philosophy, poetry, and science that explores our relationship with the cosmos and the stars from the 19th century to today.

Between an essay and a narrative, Common Stars takes its starting point from an 1871 text, Eternity by the Stars by Auguste Blanqui. At the time, this revolutionary thinker was imprisoned on an island in Brittany, surrounded by the sea, developing astronomical speculation while the Commune set Paris ablaze. He wrote about the heavens at the same time as the people had never been closer to their rights. Starting from this unique position of enunciation, the author is guided by the following intuition: could the starry night be a veritable instrument of political emancipation?