Matters
Duncan Evennou, Clémence Halle and Benoît Verjat
Thursday 17 May 2018, 4pm
Matters is a solo performance which, in a polyphonic assemblage, gives form and body to the archives of the inaugural meeting of the Anthropocene Working Group, which took place on Friday 17 October 2014 at 9:0 am, on the stage of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, in Berlin.
The geological hypothesis, increasingly heard in the world of the arts, situates the consequences of human impacts on the environment in the depths of terrestrial time. In Matters, the actor situates and then transforms the historical, scientific and political voices of the members of the group, playing with the sensitivity of their words, and shifting from their narratives to their hesitations, their silences or their mockery. He makes light of the frictions of thinking that occur when the sciences get up on stage.
Between the interstices of an increasingly disrupted performance, we begin to see cracks appear in the prevailing political discourse on the end of the world, helpless in the face of the long, non-human representations of time that we are called upon to imagine by geologists . Yet it is only the end of a world. Do we hear other worlds emerging from the hectic din of sciences confused by the urgent need to act?
Matters is being programmed as part of the Printemps des Laboratoires #6, which, under the title Endetter et punir, explores various aspects of present-day debt – ecological, economic, colonial and patriarchal –, in order to achieve a more effective perspective on political, social and personal alternatives, and to open out onto imaginative visions and the narratives that arise out of them.
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Free entrance on reservation
at reservation@leslaboratoires.org or 01 53 56 15 90
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Duncan Evennou is a contemporary French performer and director. In 2012, he graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieur d'Art Dramatique du Théâtre National de Bretagne, under the direction of Stanislas Nordey. Having completed the Political Arts Experimentation Programme (SPEAP) at the Ecole des Sciences Politiques, he is now focusing on interdisciplinary work at the interface of drama, sociology and visual art involving the three key dynamics of creation, research and pedagogy.
Clémence Hallé is a doctoral student at the École Normale Supérieure in the "Sciences, Arts, Creation, Research" department. Her thesis is on the aesthetic history of the Anthropocene and she is continuing the research into ecological representation that she began with SPEAP as her field of study. She notably wrote a report on an advance simulation of COP21 at the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, Paris Climat 2015: Make it Work, in the form of a play, with SPEAP illustrator Anne-Sophie Milon.
Benoît Verjat is a graduate of the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Strasbourg. For over 10 years, he has designed and produced numerous instruments for the creation, editing and exploration of visual representation. These instruments have found iterations and applications in art, design, scenography and performance, but also in political science, biology and social and human sciences. In 2015, he worked with the SPEAP, and joined the Médialab, a department set up to create instruments and visualisations in tandem with STS (Science, Technology and Social science) researchers.
