Visual Arts

The project “Green Frequencies” for ‘Crossing Border/ Border Crossing’ International Festival of Intermedia is a cross/ mix-media immersive performance. It will be articulated around the representation of a lettuce, an elegant green element of nature that looks like a flower but that is just a vegetable. Fabrication and reality are intertwined.
The performance will be elaborated around a living lettuce that will be central to the project and its derivative formats. Using compatible and heterogeneous art forms, different representations of this vegetable will gravitate around the notion of ‘original’. It will be a mise en abyme (curve ball), evolving through sound, drawing, painting, sculptural element and video. Images and sound circulates from the living to the dematerialised image: the digital images.
The green lettuce will be connected with sensors to specific sound equipment; the emitted frequencies will be translated into melodies. It will thereby give out a voice. Neon light and oil paintings, among other elements, will be in dialogue with video images (the hands of gardener, a child’s hands drawing a lettuce…). Many of these works already exist and were previously presented as part of separate installations (Jardin Résonance Musicale Paris, Naked Forms, Divus, Prague, Chateau de Sacy-le-Petit). But, it will be the first time that these single works would be presented together as an immersive installation-performance. New works in relation to Hong Kong will be articulating the proposition.
“The aim of this project is to offer a journey through the representation of desire (s) using the image of the lettuce. My work ranges from the intimate to the very public. By this, I mean that it may involve intimate representations, for instance, images of the body. But, it also and always relates to nature, cultures and human behaviours. The work is a reflection on emancipation: in a sense of liberation, the building of our own identity and being. I see emancipation as opening ourselves to others to understand who we are, to understand who I am. It involves integrating a part of the others into my structure to reveal myself, to understand who I am. I am interested in emancipation on a personal level, a gender level as well as on a cultural level. I am interested in the ways in which these contexts, our culture and other cultures shape and nourish us to be and become. It is with this perspective in sight that I want to approach my contribution to ‘Crossing Border, Border Crossing’ Festival.”
“I am currently exploring how Green Salad / Green Frequencies translate and resonate in contemporary and ancient Chinese. For example, I am looking at ‘Grue’ a cover term used for green and blue especially in ancient Chinese. The colour qīng 青 can mean either of the colours that in English are referred to ‘green’, ‘blue’, or ‘black’ depending on the context and the nouns or fixed phrases with which it is used. I have also been contemplating the Chinese word for “color” yánsè (顏色). In Classical Chinese, the character sè (色) more accurately meant “color” in the face, or “emotion”. It was generally used alone and often implied sexual desire or desirability. This is with this information in mind that I am approaching the development of Green Frequencies in the context/ notion of ‘Crossing Border/ Border Crossing’.
Emancipation of images: in the time of dematerialised images and virtual world, real and virtual news, real and virtual politics, real and virtual social networks, we have learned to look at the spin of images and understand their exploitations. In an attempt to keep my freedom to represent subjects that matter to me, in an attempt to respect images by bringing back complexity to reality I reverse the process: I aim to start from a banal deceptive image, one of a vegetable, to hopefully open to wider horizons within an immersive installation-performance. This is what I define as a false innocent art attitude.” (CL)