Walking

The way © glasbak

The dance between nature and us, tiny creatures wandering amongst its valleys for food, shelter and more.

Cafe Hallo - Mille plateaux © vlorisfisser

As the nomads of A Thousand plateaus lit their fire, the stories they tell are carried by the smoke; a smoke that draws the contours of an old consciousness, infiltrating the hills and beyond.

Time to practice walking. Time to get lost and pass potential thresholds.

Hermit © Thiago Rocha Pitta/ St. Moritz Art Masters

Sideways festival

Festivaaalllaalla

A flock of finches

© Celeste Boursier-Mougenot 

Once, I walked from the chaos of a noisy street into the cool darkness of a church and sat to meditate : from the silence of the sacred space emerged the creaking harrowing sound of a chair sliding along the floor. 
Orchestrated by electro-magnetic captors installed outside the church, the chair was following the movements of the street's passers-by : it's with an apparent economy of means - a chair, an invisible system -, that Celeste Boursier-Mougenot uses the acoustic of objects for his soundscapes.


From here to ear © Celeste Boursier-Mougenot © Peter Whyte © Xippas gallery

The Curve gallery is now showing his last work From here to ear.

Passed a metallic-chain curtain, the gallery opens onto a seaside promenade plunged in semi-obscurity. On the walls are videos of closed-up hands playing guitar. The sound that emanates from the videos doesn't fit the visual experience but reproduces the videos' amplified signal. In immersing confusion, electric guitars can be heard at the far end of the gallery which builds anticipation.


From here to ear © Celeste Boursier-Mougenot  © Xippas gallery 

The display reveals a set of musical instruments used as feeding apparatus while a flock of 40 finches is repeatedly fleeting back and forth in a fascinating manner. 
Landing on the strings of amplified basses and guitars and perching on the top of cymbals to feed and drink, the birds transcend the space, filling it with a cascade of sounds.
While deambulating around the space, the viewers contribute to the birds' motion agenda so that the combination of the two flows determines the musical pattern. The delicate choreography of the birds contrasts with the wild sonorities induced from the guitars : the fragility of their hypnotic dance questions our human scale , challenges our presence in the room. If connections inevitably occur, viewers never truely interact with the birds; an invisible force almost separates us from their relentless activity, until the soundscape initiates a fleeting point, an atemporal window between human and animal realms.


© Celeste Bousier Mougenot

From here to hear was previously shown for the Estuaire in Nantes, a shipping harbour between river and ocean. 
As Celeste suggests, beyond principles of chance and hazardous beauty lies a desire to find less subjective ways to compose music, such as observing - and re-thinking - life's diverse currents of activities as auditive matter.
His sensory landscapes mirror nature's sacred geometry to reveal processes of harmonic and chaotic complexity. 

Thanks to Celeste Boursier-Mougenot.

Chasing Napoleon

Chasing Napoleon, Palais de Tokyo, 2010




























Unacabine (and the original in an FBI basement) © Kusmirowski

Why is Theodore Kaczynscki's manifesto Industrial Society and its Future, kept secret by american services alongside his memoirs ? what frightens so much the american system now he is strictly isolated under police control ?
To understand america's public ennemy,The Unabomber Book Collection by Dora Winter's collective builds up the escapist strategies while Robert Kusmirowski's Unacabine give existence to Kaczynski's flee into the wild.
The presence of his shed in the gallery space of The Palais de Tokyo challenges its legitimity : what makes the difference between the shed he lived in, the lived object, and the fake one ?
The door that asks to be opened, the incapacity to enter, deepen the mystery : the enclosed house encapsulates the uncanny nature of radicalism and extremism as a choice of life, freezing a time forever gone and inaccessible so that Kaczynski's motivations remain terra incognita, his borderline personality won't be framed.
The imperceptible nature of truth, frontiers between real and unreal, are reinforced by an empty plinth on the side of the shed where Thomas Friedman has placed A curse. The aura of the shed and the invisible malediction mirror each other's faith in the tangibility of the unseen.


Spider Hole © Christoph Buchel © Dazed & Confused  

Further away, we can climb inside Christoph Buchel's Spider hole and experience how to hide - like Saddam Hussein. 
Through the exhibition, escapists flee via devices - shed, hole, airvent, drain -, remain invisible from surveillance and control.


Nathaniel knows © Taro Nasu © Ryan Gander

Their disappearance suggests the existence of parallel dimensions : Ryan Gander breaks into the Palais de Tokyo as if coming from an heterotopia of wilderness, a lost hedonist paradise as the title Nathaniel knows suggests (Andre Gide, Les nourritures terrestres). 















Vorkuta © Micol Assael © Andre Morin

After the critical reference to american capitalism and Napoleon's imperialism, Micol Assael's re-enactement of a communist gulag mirrors the collapse of all systems : in the absence of the worker, Vorkuta's engine is empty of its potency and those who stood in the way of the regime have disappeared.

With Paul Lafolley who explores spatial dimensions, the escape from the constraining boundaries is total. Utopia becomes a suspension between the possible and the impossible, the invisible - or para-normal - recalls the existence of multivers and their "total non-existence". When he affirms having temporary left our physical world during an electroshock in 1961, it somehow reflects Kaczynski's enforced mind control during his C.I.A. funded studies as we wonder how much the stress tests impacted on his sanity.
The chosen year 1977 - that according to the Palais de Tokyo refers to a time when the Unabomber survives by himself in his cabane in the Montana, or when Paul Laffoley finishes his odyssey, refers above all to a time zero - the birth of punk -, an apolitical, subversive dimension and collapse of values.
Now if we go back to the beginning of the show, For the dogs (...) a prelude for piano by Erick Satie and David Allen is being played on such high frequency that it can't be heard by human ear : a sound piece, and a wave field that we didn't perceive, which does exist outside our realm of senses.

The Drawing room

Drawing 100 © Vong Phaophanit

Drawing can be related to performing when it records a process of external transformation, of self power, of cathartis. In the context of a residency, such as the Centre for Drawing, drawing for the purpose of drawing doesn't respond to a practical demand (like when drawing to keep record or inform) which makes it difficult to know how to start, even more difficult to know how to stop.
Artist Vong Phaophanit stretches the nature of drawing by qualifying it as " the most basic of acts (...) without a specific function ". He compares his position in the isolation of the Drawing room in front of the blank paper, to the one of being like a sponge absorbing external sounds breaking through the walls (sounds of the outside world, coming from the sculpture workshop area behind his room and from a nearby primary school). When looking at his drawings in that perspective it's very affirming of what they encompass, it makes it clearer to the eye that they recall sound vibrations and are " results of an experience of the unconscious (...), moments of vacillation between consciousness and unconsciousness. "