Les commissaires anonymes

Complex lecture

Mathilde — 2018-08-04T14:37:46Z

In the frame of the exhibition EX.PDF : EXPOSER LES ÉCRITURES EXPOSÉES of Label Hypothèse at Mains d'oeuvres, Mathilde Sauzet, curator and autor of Les commissaires anonymes, and Anne-Sarah Huet, artist et economist, contributor for the Ghettopera book performed a composition of texts about complexity with musical exerpts of Gabriel Mattei.

The performance is composed as a back and fourth between two distinct texts read by their respective authors mixed following a system of notes.
: Mathilde elaborate about the three artworks (The ventriloquist convention of Gisèle Vienne, I Soldier of Köken Ergun et The Excluded. In a moment of danger of Chto Delat). And Anne-Sarah Huet translates the enunciations into a game theory set, developped from a note to another.

The ventriloquist, the soldier and the geant ear are the main actors of an operatic and non operational theory .

Alternatively to the reading parts, several pieces of opera are broadcasted in midi format from a handy speaker. Mix of art, music and mathematic languages, the double discourse builds up, little by little, poetical mental images, thoses inherent to language complexity.

Duration: 20 minutes

The disoriented cabaret

2017-08-23T21:59:00Z

Dutch Art Institute

Leaving the lecture component behind, “The Disoriented Cabaret” written by Mathilde Sauzet and composed by Gabriel Mattei took a leap into full-fledged performance territory. This cabaret-opera comprised of singing, spoken and instrumental parts is “a fiction inspired by many articles that have been published between November 2015 and March 2016 and particularly ‘Molenbeek is not a ghetto' written by Alexandre Laumonier, published in the newspaper Le Monde the 27th of November 2015”. Historically, cabaret has always acted as a form of social critique; costumed and dressed, its accessibility and humor endows it with a remarkable capacity to identify and crack open the most formidable power structures, without ever feeling too serious.

The script, printed out in a newspaper-like format, was handed out to audience members before the show began. When fully opened, the back of the paper reads in large-print.

“STORYTELLING REPETITION SCHIZOPHRENIA STIGMATISATION”

The cast is made up of six players, including the audience as The generic crowd, and the stage director, Mathilde. Introducing her role in the beginning she says, “Hello, I'm the director. I'm not part of the show, but somehow a bit because I wrote it. Nevertheless, I want to speak a bit about the context. So the performance happens in the municipality of Molenbeek, in Brussels, where I live, a place where radical Islamist communities are established as well…” Les commissaires anonymes ask, “Is art our ghetto?” They use the situation of Molenbeek to ask “if arts really interacts with reality? Is art a means of inclusion or exclusion?”

Bringing herself into the performance to direct the other players, Mathilde calls attention to the rehearsal mode of this performance: it is fixed in the moment of becoming, never crystallizing into a so-called final performance. This aspect of it critically reflects the political situation to which it refers (in Molenbeek, among other places), itself an unfolding chain of events and process of “systematic disorientation”.
Mathilde maintains that “this play can be autonomous as an art work”. Though her main practice is curating, she did this work “as an embodiment of an artistic exchange between various languages. As the stage director, I play also the curator, trying to find a form of encounter for these four artists… the script is the support of reflection and action.”

how to say something

2015-07-19T15:39:00Z

Dutch Art Institute

20 minutes, 12 t-shirts, a mic and speakers.

This performance came out of a piece of writing started during the residency program of the Dutch Art Institute in Marfa,Texas around issues of communication and the means of individual and collective addresses. How to say something? is an attempt to share the intimate, engaging and poetical process of “voicing”. It is a translation exercise from writing to speech; from mental representations to physical presence.

How to say something? is composed from a letter read and an interactive discourse between a theoretical text about communication and basic short sentences associated with misunderstandings, written on t-shirts. While the protagonist is explaining her speech, a counter-discourse happens on the t-shirts layered on top of each other, one after another.

Extract of the text of the performance:
“ What is the invention of a language?
And what does it make us able to do?
The movement of Los indignados had this slogan « We have a vote but we don't have a voice ». The voice is the first form of expression, the incarnation of a presence, a means to get out of oneself. Without it, we can't discuss, cry, shout, read. Los indignados denounce a lack of listening, but beyond that they denounce the inability to give substance to a language. To Say: « we don't have a voice » is to blame democratic institutions, but first of all, it's a confession of powerlessness. An abundance of discourse and rhetoric, and too many communication devices make us suspicious and incredulous with language. Too attached to the effectiveness of our instruments, do we not forget that language is an uncertain tool, fallible, precisely because it is irrational.
In his text On the language, Walter Benjamin evokes a « spiritual essence » of language : beyond the function of communication, it is testimony to the presence of the human spirit, the moment when humans express themselves not by language but into it. The unintelligible is mixed with the senses. Language becomes from the order of beliefs. But to believe in what? Benjamin could answer:
« …in the immediacy of all spiritual communication. It's precisely the fundamental problem of the theory of language, and if we qualify of « magic » this immediacy, the original problem of language is its magic. »
Gilles Deleuze said that to love someone, one needs to perceive his folly. I have the intuition that to communicate with someone, one should start to perceive his poetry.”

ETIENNE BOULANGER, IMMEDIATELY (WITHOUT MEDIATION)

2014-07-20T15:35:00Z

fabrique Expoplu
association Etienne Boulanger

A presentation of the work of Etienne Boulanger and Edwin Stolk within the exhibition Subject/ The power of a way of thinking has above all to do with its ability to move curated by Stijn Van Dorpe.

« IMMEDIATELY (AT ONCE) & IMMEDIATELY (WITHOUT MEDIATION)." Hakim Bey

The french artist Etienne Boulanger died in 2008 while he was in residency in New York. Following this tragic event, a foundation has been constituted consisting of his artworks and his documents of research. The foundation is active today in order to make the body of Boulanger's work known and revisited by artists, curators and public. The exhibition in Nijmegen presented a large sized projection of slides that the artist had realized on the huge urban building sites of Beijing in 2004. In the context of an afternoon of lectures around the exhibition, Les Commissaires anonymes were invited to explore the Boulanger foundation collection to produce a lecture from an analytic, critical and performative point of view.