calendario eventi  :: 

X

8/12/2011

Anniversaire 4

Le College / Frac Champagne-Ardenne, Reims

The fields of art and theatre have been intertwined throughout the Twentieth Century. From the Wagnerian ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ to dada anti-theatre, through to ‘happenings’, there are many points of convergence between these disciplines, which have notably contributed to changing the relationship between a piece, its audience and space. Performance is a good example of these transdisciplinary mixings. As part of the third instalment of Reims Scènes d’Europe, the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne celebrates this ephemeral art form by inviting artists from all over Europe.

Friday December 9, salle Jean-Pierre Miquel (2, rue Eugène Wiet)

7pm: Luigi Presicce (1976, Italia)
Allegoria astratta dell'atelier del pittore all'inferno tra le punte gemelle, 2011

Luigi Presicce is interested in magic, religion, ritual, occult practices and folk art. He uses performance as his main medium of expression. In his recent work, he often associates historical figures and mysterious events with primitive places and rituals. He creates images and mythological characters which are not easily recognisable, where references blend into actions, which become symbolic and are emptied of their original sacred meaning. This loss of sacredness confers a new reading on these actions and instruments, and creates a new-layered structure of language, which often departs from an image and also often results in another image. The public is always selected and usually reduced to a maximum of two spectators. He is very interested that his actions are part of a process of self-archaeologisation.

8.30pm: Sara Lundén (1970, Sweden)
Requiem pour une cigarette #2 (The French Counting Songs), 2011

Sara Lundén is a singer, musician and performance artist. She started out making music and performances around 1997 during her art studies at Royal College University of Fine Arts Stockholm where she received an MFA. Since the late 90’s, she’s been developing her own personal musical style mixing influences from disco, schlager, chanson, electronica and minimal wave. Her live performances often involves theatrical costumes and live musicians i.e. Deadly Boring (1999) where a men’s choir, adds a background for her vocals.

In Reims, Sara Lundén present a new performance, called Requiem for a Cigarette #2 (The French Counting Songs), whose starting point is a combination of at least two obsessions, cigarette smoking and counting in French.

Saturday December 10, salle Jean-Pierre Miquel (2, rue Eugène Wiet)

2.30 pm: Das Dingbat (Constantin Alexandrakis, 1978, France / Olivier Nourisson, 1968, France)

“Dingbat” means stupid, fool, shithead, dimwit or doofus but it’s also a late sixties typology in Los Angeles’ vernacular architecture. A kind of architecture that apes Mies Van Der Rohe’s minimalism to produce low cost concrete cubes covered up with stucco, whose sign is the only ornamental element. An architecture without architect, build by construction companies. Condos that stands out against the regular L.A’s typology: one house, one garden, one car. Nowadays, in a reversive twist of architect/ constructor roles, “dingbats” are studied as a solution to create density against L.A’s out-of-control growth. “Das Ding” means “The Thing” in German. Freud’s Thing but also Lacan’s one. For the first one, Das Ding is the hidden thing, off-screen, what can’t be named, while knowing that it’s there, lying low; for the second, it’s an object around which is organized the field of unconscious representations, subject to the pleasure principle, what Lacan calls the significant round. Thus, surrounded by symbolic, a reality point is established at the subject’s very core, a reality point that is nothing else than the forever lost object, that Lacan calls “the thing”.

3.30 pm: Karl Holmqvist (1964, Sweden)

Swedish artist Karl Holmqvist blends poetry and pop music through cut-ups based on the similar structuring of both forms of composition. His texts, composed of anecdotes as famous as they are diverse, seem to be streams of consciousness in which one can trace Gertrude Stein and Chicks on Speed, William Blake and the Rolling Stones. Karl Holmqvist’s texts represent a writing method that is based on lengthy collages of quotes, song lyrics, lists, and other often pop-cultural or trivial sources. Through cut-ups or repetition, occasional rhyme and mantra-like rhythm, these minimal, geometric linguistic arrangements orbit a nucleus that is at the same time analytical and meditative, and that question the cultural hegemony of rationality and authority in any sort of authorship.

4.30 pm: Nicola Martini (1984, Italia)

Matter and its metamorphoses are both the starting and end point of Nicola Martini’s entire artistic endeavor. There is nothing haphazard about his use of the word “process” since, beyond the sculptures and installations he creates, his underlying concern is with the process whereby creation is enacted. Martini displays physical changes of state, be they inherent to the material used (plastic, resins, grease, synthetic fibers, copper, cement, etc.) or brought about by interactions between different materials. These processes result in works whose aim is to engage the spectator with the exhibition’s space, which the artist puts to ever-changing use: at times, he expands the space by adding installations, at others, the modifications are esthetically minimal.

By re-interpreting certain hallmarks of Arte Povera, Process Art and, even more, the Anti-Form movement, Martini gives in to the act of creation, the conclusion of which simply bears witness to the process undertaken. Thus, the chemical and entropic properties of the materials used call into question the very role of the artist and the paternity of the artwork, which in the case of Martini undergoes modifications and transformations over time, subsisting beyond, and often dispensing with, the artist’s presence.

6.30 pm: Emma Kay (1961, United Kingdom)
The March, 2011

Emma Kay confronts us with our culture’s desire to pinpoint an individual who can embody and authenticate the ideal of encyclopedic knowledge. Highlighting the effort and absurdity of flexing the mind muscle, she discloses the humor and beauty of its inescapable limitations. She explores the capacity to retrieve knowledge from memory in works like Shakespeare from Memory (1998) and The Future from Memory (2001) in order to address the fantasy of the human capacity to acquire universal knowledge.
The March (2011) is an extended poetic monologue. It is the product of meticulous research, and is written from the point of view of a hypothetical (and eternal) single participant in 500 years of social protest, up to the present day. The March is a piece of research with the research taken out - a text with all facts, dates, events, locations and names excised. What remains is the visual - a text that describes fleeting moments; the experience and thoughts of an eternal, multivalent protestor. The speaker moves around the gallery to a choreographic plan, which is entirely site specific, and which the audience is not able to anticipate. The speaker occupies different aspects of the space and the props placed within it, sitting at and standing on steps, tables, chairs, stage blocks, doors - props that are found on the site – minimally representative aids to the words spoken by this one person on an odyssey through the history of social protest.

7.30 pm: Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen (1970, Philippines/Danemark)
The present doesn’t exist in my mind… the future is already far behind…, 2009

Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen works primarily in the field of new media. Although her videos are inspired by documentary, she twists the genre with her aesthetic intention. Her interest lies in socio-cultural relations, where she examines identity, gender and socio-cultural relations connected to different communities in the society. The anthropological and sociological perspectives on issues of identity and gender pose the question on how socio-cultural constructions are deeply influenced by different individual circumstances, specific environments and roots. The examination of the locations questions how the self is constituted and how people act within a group either chosen or determined in social situations such as work, education, leisure time or the basic structure of the family.

The present doesn´t exist in my mind… the future is already far behind… (2009) is an accumulation of different artistic expression with components of poetry, architecture, song, music, choreography, costume design and animated graphic design. A one woman performance by Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen. The project is divided in time: the past, present and future. All 3 parts are intertwined. The Past is a selection of poems by Mina Loy (1882-1966), reconstituted and provide the point of entry for four compositions by Pete Drungle and spoken words by Cuenca. The Present consists of two tracks by the composer Brian Bender and lyrics by the artist. The Future is a new manifest for the arts of this millennium, The Artist´s Song. The music is a remix of Brian Bender from previous Artists´ Songs from 2007 and 2008. Radical in language, it speaks aloud and about what art should be and should not be.

8.30 pm: Mathias Kryger (1977, Danemark)
Group Therapy, 2011

Mathias Kryger works with the performative in a range of forms and media: As a performance artist, a curator, a writer and as a singer in his post r’n’b band “Back In Dirty Minutes”. His work is dealing with intersubjectivity and language, gender and popular culture. He feels strongly attached to the ideas about the copy, the cover song and the impersonator – about creating a body or gestalt by biting into an already existing body – the body of a person or a body of work. In the performance-series Ladies In Pain – Rehearsal Performances 1 to 10, Mathias Kryger embodied ten popular love songs made famous by women, accentuating the song’s painful content by insisting on accompanying himself on the guitar, leaving a huge gap between the music played and the insisting quality of the voice and thus adding to the pain.

In Group Therapy, a new performance, Mathias Kryger will interpret a script for various voices miming a group situation. The script is investigating ideas of psychoanalysis, capitalism, the schizophrenic and the borders of the individual.

Image: Luigi Presicce, Allegoria astratta dell'atelier del pittore all'inferno tra le punte gemelle, 2011

Le College / Frac Champagne-Ardenne
1 place Museux - Reims
Fri from 7pm, sat from 2.30pm
Free admission

stampa

permanent link