27 November 2014 – 10 January 2015

Originally inspired by Fluxus performance, where simple, repeated actions produced sounds, Sylvie Fleury's Camino del Sol, with its own aesthetic premise, incorporated gestures from everyday life revealing the vibrational presence of individuals. The set-up allowed for the poetic, the sonic and sometimes the absurd to bloom.

As in the events, dance performances and happenings developed by Merce Cunningham and John Cage in the late fifties onwards, the fusion between forms of expression combine, defying limits between disciplines while using technologies of our time and exploring our relationship to staged settings.

Pedestals, stairways, stages, and golden ladders were some of the few objects that are part of the set. A large overall projection of the golden escalators of one of the oldest shopping malls in the US was looped upwards. Like a spacecraft’s porthole, it might be waiting for passengers suggesting a potential escape.

Different characters entered the space, making simple repetitive gestures such as polishing a car part, drying their hair, snapping photographs of the audience, turning pages in a book. These actions produced a surprising range of sounds arranged live into a composition. 

Discreet and elaborate technologies devised with the help of Diemo Schwarz, a composer at the IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) translated actions into sounds.  The performers wore sensors that trigger sounds modulated by the speed and intensity of their actions. With this system, the random, the accidental and the spontaneous cohabitated. The performers literally acted like musical instruments playing their own song, which was then distorted by the technology, transmission and the intentions of the composers.

The mundane gestures acted as reminders of the music and actions in our lives that produce our environment.  A camera shooting released the sound of broken glass, or an explosion, the sound of a page turning that of a UFO. A butterfly flapping its wings might create a tornado.

The dancer, evoked the character of the Serpentine emerges at some point on the scene as a symbol of the wild aspect of our consciousness that breaks away from the everyday into a hypnotic trance. This character was very loosely inspired by dancer Loie Fuller (1862-1928) revolutionizing the staging of contemporary dance through lighting effects, dress conventions and new forms of movement.

Within the performance, each individual was emitting a frequency. The piece examined inner pathways, and chaotic processes of elevation and emancipation. The costumes in highly intense colors were mostly hand-made, responding to the natural and unconventional body types of the women performing. They revealed the identity of the performers and partially recognizable personae. Their tailored outfits contrasted with the loose white dress of the dancer.

Dualities were present within these attributions of femininity, slightly distorted in each of the characters, as was the music.

One of the very few rules viewers and performers alike surrendered to, visible or invisible, was the dynamic of infinite motion in space. The sign on the “shop” possibly symbolized this. The word shop was ambiguous, it could be a store or a place where things were made or fixed. The shop in Camino del Sol was a heterogeneous space: a white cube from the outside; it offered a place to reconnect on the inside. The artist with the archetype of the grotto and the cave previously explored this idea of hidden recesses and clefts. 

The performance and its environment evoked recurring themes in the artist’s work such as the interplay between surfaces and desire, accessories and the imaginary, as well as the construction of identity and even our quasi-absurd quest for self-perfection. But within this environment, no brands wre visible. Fleury’s traditionally recognizable casts of consumer objects, of Duchampian gestures were present but have shifted in function. This time objects on display were used as theater props.  They were also like time capsules of other eras, anchored in the present through sound.

In this project, Sylvie Fleury’s approach offered new codes, systems and circuits of attention to substitute those she has previously explored, celebrated and critiqued. As one of the new light works comments at the entrance: “The only good system is a sound system.”