As the year draws to a close, Le Générateur invites its extended family of artists, friends and regulars to get together for a meal. It’s a chance for us to get together and have a laugh, remembering all we’ve been through.
Like last year it’s also an opportunity to argue around an issue that closely affects performance practice. After discussing cell phones and photography in performance last year, you’ve chosen the question of mediation for this new edition.
Talking about performance is never simple; it’s neither really theater, nor quite visual art; it’s seen in the moment and disappears immediately, and it sometimes exists only in the narrative of a memory or, more often, an archive. But if the archive is a form of mediation, and mediation is already transmission, it’s because there’s always something to be transmitted and understood from a performance.
So, does this mean that mediation is indispensable? As with other mediums, without a guide, without an archive, without a little theoretical headlamp to light the way, the public would be condemned to wander through the performance like a wasteland, or never to enter it.
On the contrary, the performer would be an advocate of pure action, of a performance that speaks for itself. Experience would be the only truth, and everything else – texts, notices, speeches – would be no more than an exercise in style, or worse: a claim to transform freedom into an official document.
If it’s action against text, then it’s archivists against arsonists. And Le Générateur, in the middle, serene of all.tes invite you to the same table to discuss it.
We’ll be joining two professionals:
Marco Renzo dell’Omordame, researcher and teacher at Paris I, whose work on happenings, cultural studies and alternative cultures intersects perfectly with the spirit of the place. With him, we’ll discuss cultural legitimacy and the “shifts” that need to be established in our knowledge of art.
And Elena Lespez Muños, curator and public relations officer at Bétonsalon – Centre d’art et de recherche. There, on a daily basis, she practices and invents an excellent entanglement between the quality of content and the density of a performance program. Her insight from the field will help us address the question of transmission.
Talk about it around you and come one, come all! (we’re making mulled wine!)
At the end of the discussions, if members weren’t too upset, they are invited to renew their memberships for 2026 😉