XTNDD Matter, performance, 30 min, 2019
Sculpture Guillaume Constantin
Production Les Instants Chavirés

Violaine Lochu created the performance XTNDD Matter at the invitation of Guillaume Constantin, based on his sculpture Le Fantôme du Quartz XXXIX (Music from the body).

The sculpture / structure by G. Constantin, which convokes the aesthetics and usages of a display cabinet or a curiosity cabinet, presents different types of objects (soap, necklaces, record covers, paper clips, miniature works…) the artist collected among friends or from her own everyday life.

In a game of dialogue and repossession, Violaine Lochu reactivates the sculpture and diverts the design into the environment of her own performance: an ensemble of signs to reinterpret and translate.

Violaine Lochu plays with this sculpture and treats it as a décor or a little theatre, deploying a series of figures – apparitions, dissimulations, hybridations, prolongations – and gestures – pulling, pushing, carrying, lowering, opening, tying, interlocking, caressing, pressing…

She also invents a corpus of vocal, sound, choreographic signs that echo the visual signs (forms, volumes, planes, lines, textures, weights, colours, objects…) found in Constantin’s work. In the beginning of the performance, the both comical and disturbing character incarnated by V. Lochu seems to pop up like a Jack in the box. With face and arms painted the same colour pink as the sculpture, the character resembles a rather grotesque extension or a prosthesis of the piece. (Choreo-)graphical signs are formed around this figure clothed in black, with black shoes; automated movements like a mechanical ballet…