Work > Writing > Post performance anatomy (the third first time)

post performance anatomy (the third first time)

I stopped practicing live art in 2007 to only come back to it in 2017. 
It was partly by design but also a product of Paris' context and the urgency for me to heal deep inside. I received one action poetry invitation that I couldn't refuse because I couldn't say no to a friend. I went to Köln, Germany and experimented on stage between liveness and generative visual art in 2012. That was it.
Meanwhile, I wrote novels, composed sound art pieces, co-curated and produced le déserteur. But after trying to survive France for three decades, I had to face resilience and accept my vulnerability to have a chance to heal, change, and move forward.

I have always been a one-man band and Swiss army knife, but Paris’ context impacted my DIY abilities. Where you live and the people you are spending time with is crucial. They can, at times, undermine your intention and vision. 
Before I actually gave myself the permission to unlock them, I found ways to sabotage myself. My system was straightforward and my morality justifiable. I tried my best to help people, especially if they didn't ask for it or wanted it. In fact, it was a vicious spiral of intrusion and co-dependency.
It was a comfortable position for me where people were a proxy and their work a placebo. 
I was not growing, I was shrinking, and I suppose it was my desire.

The second part of the story is Paris in itself which is the opposite of the realness of my hometown, Lyon. It took me a decade to understand my discomfort in a place that was supposed to be designed for my professional aspirations. I spent seven years reasoning myself to believe that I belonged, even though it was already too small, too linear and conservative. But, now that I think about it, the first day when I took the elevator to reach the sixth floor of my dream job, I could swear that my environment was becoming smaller floor number after floor number. It was not a sign; it was a spoiler.
Paris is the epicentre and blueprint of France’s social and colonial coercive system, I should have protected myself better, or maybe I did it too much. 
I was transitioning inside the belly of the beast and took it for an amusement park.
Paris is a mirage-based architecture and a culture overpopulated by fickle people that could live forever inside the title of a Milan Kundera book. Unfortunately, I became one of them, or I enjoyed the cosplay a little too much.
In a space where every structure and philosophy is about pretending, the only outcome is to produce pretentious people. And pretending and pretention have no place inside the ephemeral fragility of liveness. I lived in a place perfect for a social media handle, but it was dismantling my realness day after day.

I managed to surround myself with people afraid of liveness, afraid of people. 
I created all the necessary conditions to separate myself from my art, from the audience. After years of activism and vandalism during my youth, I convinced myself that I needed a break. 
I needed time to live, a respectable job, and a place to sleep with a door that I could lock.
I was living a life away from it.

When I left Paris, I got my life back. When I healed in Copenhagen, I got my liveness back. When I arrived in Brooklyn, I got my realness back.
If you don't have those three elements, you will cease to exist.

I thought about this last July, just before entering my first live art experience as an artist, for the last fifteen months. More than a year had passed since I last performed in person in Brussels during an evening in January 2020. That night, I decided that I would  not allow anyone to define or deny my space during my practice, no matter their number, reasons and disillusion. 
I returned to Brussels during a grey summer of 2021 to perform UNDERmy-your-ourSKIN for the Trouble Festival curated by Antoine Pickels. I was finally be able to see people inside my space during a time I created. 
Since I do not respect the word happiness, I would say that moment insufflated in me a dense and warm stream of joy. I wanted to cry and laugh at the same time.

Brussels allowed me to think about myself inside a space and, more importantly, the audience in it. The nature and function of a space are not neutral. I am responsible of those parameters, while the audience should be accountable for their behaviour when they enter someone else's home.
I'll talk about the second phase of UNDERmy-your-ourSKIN soon, but I can speak of the space and context that Antoine Pickels offered me.

Is being real synonymous with practicing live art everywhere, in every circumstance? 
I did it so many times between 2001 and 2007 that I ended up believing that. 
Realness is not a dogma; it is a state of being made of trauma, scars, grief and granularity. But what it is to me, shouldn't be how I envisage collective liveness. 
After more than a year of screen-based and mostly passive online performance, I had to choose a field of view. 
Those people with their high definition head inside neutral digital architecture and space deserved something more and different.
Antoine Pickels proposed that I practice inside a former museum, located above a McDonald’s, inside a central station. The unexpected caveat was the political context of the place. The central station was the theatre of a hide-and-seek party between migrants trying to reach the UK and police officers colonizing the space visually. 
Since that day, this context has been a gift and a curse.

This is why I was struck by this reality when I performed Data Sampling / Ghost suffering two months later for the third time in New York for “Title To Be Determined” at Starta Arta. The predictable aspect of the repetition was an elementary concern.
Every time I transmit Data Sampling / Ghost suffering to the audience, be it in Venice, Liverpool and this time New York, I embrace the space given and encapsulate it without thinking about it. However, by doing so, I separate myself from the audience. Even though I interact numerous times with them, each interaction attempts to reach them and enrolls them inside that capsule. It is a proxy for a placebo.

My discomfort with this configuration is that it is and was staged. Not by design but staged nevertheless.

A staged live art is my definition of pretending. It could also lead to a pretentious esthetic. During the coming weeks, I'll have to truly question myself and decide what unstaged means to liveness.
I will also have to stay real when everything has to be safe.

The only thing I know, for now, is that if you come to one of my live experience you won’t be treated as an audience. I don't want to be viewed, I want us to see, to think, to feel, to be.

Be present.
I'll be the anchor.
You'll be the movement.