LATERNA MAGICA'S OPENING EVENT PHANTASMAGORIA
VIDEO
NOVEAUX CLASSIQUES (2018)
Video perfomance by Sylvain Souklaye & Benjamin Paulin
The unspoken video performance Nouveaux Classiques reveals fragile fragments of friendship and decency between the artist Sylvain Souklaye and the singer Benjamin Paulin.
Nouveaux Classiques explores how premeditated words, sequenced dialogue and the certainty of knowledge can become an obstacle when one tries to establish a link between the inner-self and the outside world during an interview.
The artist is supposed to provide a detailed interview and the singer has the opportunity to articulate the grey areas of his album
L’Homme Moderne. In the end, neither rhetoric nor punchlines are left or needed to expose an unsettling intimacy for two.
They know each other… One knows the questions… The other knows the answers… But none of that matters when silence is the how, the when, and the where.
Nouveaux Classiques is performed by Sylvain Souklaye and Benjamin Paulin. Filmed and edited by Frédéric Vermeersch.
BODY CORPOREAL (2018)
Video performance by Sall Lam Toro
“Self-love demands that we evoke our own gazes in a consumer-based culture producing patriarchal hetero-western-centric based gazes in mainstream global cultures. So, I ask you to reclaim your own gaze through a process of active consciousness.”
This piece is a visual evocation-manifesto that arose from a poem written about a willingness to decommodify the body and liberate it from the tensions between socially capitalized and visceral body; finding ways to conciliate several identities and forms doing and redoing the binary within queerness and produce new imaginations for blackness through nature, channeling our intuition and consciousness.
Secondly, it is a process-based piece speaking of forms of decapitalization juxtaposing a reclamation of self-love not as a substitute, but rather as a supplement. Through butoh-inspired movement, dance improvisation and poetic interactions with nature elements, the body reclaims its own authorship and authentic gaze.
Read more about artist Sall Lam Toro here: www.salllamtoro.com
Dragedukke (2018)
Video performance by Lillibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
Dragedukke has an immediate and abstract expression, though full of symbols and references, as to Nicolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783-1872), an important figure representing Danish ideologies and (national) identity. The Dragedukke-persona moves around incognito and ghost-like in the minimalistic, gothic architecture of Grundtvig Church in Copenhagen. Dragedukke is wearing a hybridized folk costume with several layers as well as references to cultures as Danish, Tagalog, American, Dutch etc. The song and sounds are lyrics based on I-s in different languages: I-jeg-ako –yo-watashi-eu.
The term Dragedukke origins from mid 1800, when the geographic border between Denmark and Germany changed drastically. It signifies a person, who feels torn between several national identities.
Read about artist Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen here: www.lilibethcuenca.com