Les Mots troubles #5, Cabaret
Les Mots troubles #5 gathers the artist Fatma Cheffi, Zoé Couppé, Marcel Devillers, Nelle Gevers, Than Hussein Clark, Marc-Aurèle Ngoma, Harilay Rabenjamina, liv schulman and HaYoung.
For this fifth and final session, Julie invited me to imagine the evening with her. I am an independent curator, I teach art history, I write almost every day. For several years, Julie and I have been having a discussion about the daily life of artistic work, our material conditions of existence, creativity, childhood, old age, theater, cultural institutions, domestic life, motherhood, or mental and reproductive health. For this last opus, we have chosen to work together: as curators together, as performers together, even if this does not correspond exactly to our usual roles.
Julie had written to me: "For my part, I always write my texts by hearing and saying them, and I wonder if it is the same for the people we are going to invite. How do they write? That might be my starting question to all of you. What is the role of the ear, what is the desire of the voice, what do we want from those who listen? This passage through the saying is true for me too, always, when I write; while I rarely read my texts aloud in the presence of an audience. What makes a text be heard is perhaps the underlying question of this solitary activity.
Les Mots troubles #5 projects the writing of 9 artists in various forms, all of which are related to performance. We explore the potential of formal ghosts/fantasms: those of the cabaret, the theater, the cinema, the concert hall; we explore the techniques of the voice, the singing, the games of speaking, the clashes of diction, the reading, the rote, the game, the whispered, what is whispered in the earpiece (we even hear voices); different registers of power of the word - form and content. We explore the potential of bodies, dressed up, cross-dressed, immobile, doubled by the video, vulnerable, blind, constrained, solid. We explore role-playing, character changes, interludes, the intermission.
What unites the artists participating in Mots troubles #5 is our deep affinity with what they are saying.
Les Mots troubles #5 is an evening of performances that will close a year of research, encounters and performances at the Fondation Ricard, conceived by the artist Julie Béna from her desire to organize "a program of encounters around the text in its oral dimension".
- Eva Barois De Caevel
