What does a society (a team) produce (create) without a plan (scenario) facing the imperious (inevitable) desire (choice) of redoing (fabricating) a world (a film) differently? The exhibition (projection) of oneself, perilous (physical) act (phenomenon) which is the corollary (the consequence) of any political or amorous (artistic) commitment (action).

UFE is a polymorphic work articulated around the fabrication of a film whose process of creation and presentation joins the logic of live art and visual art. The work raises the question of the status of a work of art, redefining its creative and producing community. It positions itself in time and space in an empirical way, between live performance and visual art. 

Politics, art and intimacy are the dramaturgical arguments of a collective story, both real and fictional, narrating the work of commitment. UFE questions the hypothesis of a society (a team, a company/companionship) guided by the utopia of revolutionized formats (in art and life).

The movie, edited in a single copy, and the performance are two independent, autonomous versions of a general artistic proposition. Movie and performance were presentend for the 1st time together on in 2015 on September 25th and 26th at the MuCEM in Marseille, as part of the festival Actoral.

the film

Not being able to initiate a societal project and concrete solutions, a small group imagines a spectacular artistic and political action which would stigmatize television’s role in the turmoil of contemporary society. The actual deed outlaws the group. From there appear the limits of each one’s commitment to a collective creation. These limits muddle intimate relations, shatter political convictions, modify the artistic goal and turns the collective fantasy in a living nightmare, within this secret micro-society. 

The fictional argument offers situations lived then filmed in several ways unsettling our logical perception. The image uses cinegeny’s codes and theater’s tricks in a free and empirical manner, searching for an allegorical and choreographic form of the narrative. The action is filmed in an isolated Alpine chalet and at Theater of Nanterre-Amandiers. The theater is an atelier of creation and a base camp, set to a fiction whose protagonists are also actors, part of a company, a rock band, a small group, artists with no work of art who commit themselves in an empirical action which could change their lives. Perhaps.

the performance

On a stage, on an exhibition space, the performance assembles the actual choreographic research conducted by a group of actors (non dancers) with the artists invited to the creative residencies*: the discourse’s modification through the choreography and vice versa. The individual or collective actions give place to an absurd fable: create from fictive or documentary arguments some fully original gesture, searching for narrative phenomenons creating moves words cannot describe and a singular discourse, empirical actions forming moving choreographic propositions. The individuals’s impulse in their quest of unique compositions, whose exhaustion becomes a pattern, generates the energy of a senseless/absurd relentlessness, sometimes comical, moving and old-fashioned. A kind of «ceremonial» of creative work which can also be seen as an (im-) possibility to live together. Where the artistic project, inventing moves, and the political project, inventing ideas fall together, like an amorous lapsus which could be the example of a revolutionized (turned) society. The exemplarity is made manifest in terms of the growing forms, the body in action, the moving desire, more than in the result of a «finished» work. The movie is screened (before, after, later or not) in its wholeness.

* Dimitri Chamblas, François Chaignaud, Mathilde Monnier, Philippe Quesne, Yves-Noël Genod and Yves Pagès