Plans d'évasion (Escape Plans)

Series of performative video installations: Libre arbitre - Free Will (1999-2001) Unité de transformation (...) - Genetic Transformation Unit (...) (2001-2003) Le Pavillon de réorganisation des sens - Senses Re-organization Pavillon (2001-2003) Jeu vidéo - Video Game (World 1 and 2) (2004-2006) La Station - The Station (2006) Le buvard du monde (2008-2010). Escape can be understood in two opposing ways: avoiding reality or freeing oneself from an alienating situation. The series deals with utopiæ (assumed as such or not) that aim at transforming poetry into reality. It explores our compulsive urge to replace ideas and ideals with images, as well as reality (that which we perceive as such) with illusions. I use the term series to mean a whole conceived as an entity in which parts complete one another and fit into each other: like episodes in a television serial, like steps or squares in a game; or even better, like a series of interlocking modules in which each intervention contains the previous one and anticipates the next. Each Escape Plan introduces a hybrid space (a site combining practices as well as formal and metaphorical languages from diverse spheres of interest) and asks: Am I able to participate and fully experience an aesthetical space-time or am I here simply as a simple passer-by? In that sense, the titles of the installations are revealing. Each time, a transformative space is offered to the viewer, one that suggests changes and denies any determinism.