des autoportraits (self-portraits)
des portraits de lieux (portraits of places)
TO ALLOW THE PRIVILEGED ENCOUNTER BEETWEN A PLACE AND AN ARTIST TO REVEAL THE POSSIBILITY OF SMALL "ENCHANTMENTS" BY TEMPORARY BREAKING INTO AND DISRUPTING THE ORDER OF EVERYDAY LIFE.
Les autoportraits et les portraits de lieux (Self-portraits and portraits of places)
Unique meetings to live out an original situation. The shared experience of a sensitive form, the crystallisation of a series of gestures in an unstable and concerted space: a dance.
The self-portraits began with a videoed choreographic journal, small super-8 films and polaroids: recordings of figures, qualities of bodies, movements, places: a note and sketch book. They then developed through the creation of choreographic works entitled Autoportraits chorégraphiques accompagnés (Accompanied choreographic self-portraits) alternating with performances involving a number of performers. The self-portrait is a private laboratory where the essence of the future project is cultivated before its implementation with all the partners. Creations fell into two categories: self-portraits and group performances. At least this was so until the day that Laurence Louppe, researcher and critic, shook this conception by questioning me about Chambre -étapes chorégraphiques en chambres d’hôtel- (Room – choreographic stages in hotel rooms). Her hypothesis was that Chambre could be read through my self-portrait approach and even be inscribed inside it, a hypothesis reinforced by the appearance of the witness in the creative process.
Reading what she said took me back to the extremely empirical way in which I work with the artists associated with my projects and to the absolute necessity of a private moment spent with each one before bringing them together as a group.
Some examples:
During the SKITE in Lisbon that proposes to roughly sixty artists to meet, I made individual 1-hour appointments in a quiet place nearby to produce a series of Photomatons.
For Les épouvantails -Portraits d’hommes en costumes de fantaisie- (The scarecrows – Portraits of men in fancy dress), a play resulting from my having recently settled in Picardie, near the Chemin des dames, and from my discovery of the force of these landscapes, I personally went to meet and film each performer in his/ her own landscape.
For Chambre, the work took the form of meetings with each performer in various hotels, generating the writing of scenarios by each artist partner.
Feuilleton -en épisodes- (Serial – in episodes-) is made up of a series of Bande-Annonces (Trailers) that invite one or two artist partners to a specific place of residency. It is accompanied by the production of a trailer used to transmit clues to the artists, from one session to another, thus delaying as long as possible the moment when they will all meet. It is this first meeting, staged directly in public, that constitutes the N°0 of Feuilleton.
Today, the practice of the self-portrait and its special relationship with a place play a central and driving role in my artistic approach. I observe this displacement in which group performances participate fully and consciously in the elaboration process of self-portraits as potential spaces of self-fiction by demultiplication of the subject. Spaces where it is possible to test what Larys Frogier calls, when talking about Autoportrait à la Criée (Self-portrait at la Criée), the “subject’s exchange capacity”.
