Vendredi 21 juin 2024
Table-ronde de 15h à 18h30
Concert de 20h à 22h
Entrée libre
L’Effort, le monde – Jacques Perconte
Table-ronde | Exhibition | Concert
Friday, June 21, 3 pm to 10 pm
Free admission
As part of his video exhibition-installation L’Effort, le monde presented from May 4 to July 13, 2024 at the Générateur, artist Jacques Perconte invites several speakers to discuss around a roundtable the themes that make up the essence of L’Effort, le monde: ecology, nature, sensitivity, technique, art, beauty of the world. This afternoon study is followed by an improvised live performance by sound artist and experimental guitarist Julien Desprez in dialogue with the film, on the occasion of the Fête de la musique.
“Lifting water and rock, the forces of the universe sculpt mountains and seas. Blowing storms and releasing earthquakes, the earth breathes. Human beings, drawing from their hearts the vigor of their love, play out their destiny in contact with these forces. Valiant mountain sailors, a few mountaineers enjoy the vertigo of the effort. Muscles taut, eyes wide open, ears alert, lungs full, they inhale and exhale their deep connection with a universe of magical contingencies. Without a word, they soar to nowhere. The intense experience of desire, from restraint to contemplation, towards letting go, to be alive, to feel alive, to come alive.
They climb as fast as they can.
Seeing, smelling, pushing, touching, no longer thinking, no longer being separated from crystals, rocks, metals, seas, birds, forests, mountains, clouds, stars, the sun… each other.
If we can forget for a few moments the staggering movement of destruction at work on the planet, we can manage to find deep within ourselves, echoing the sky, the gentle purity of the sun.
Universe dust on earth, in a few thousandths of a second for the sun and for us in minutes, hours, days, years, our efforts drive our bodies. We are the great builders of our imaginations.
But even when our bodies allow our thoughts to escape, the machines continue to mine the soil and rocks, the factories continue to burn the coals, the pipelines continue to fill with oil, the power stations beat their hearts out and the electricity spins as the planet spins. Even when we’re not looking, everything living and exploitable is intensively industrialized. We’ve made an attitude out of a nature it’s hard to imagine ever getting rid of. And while some of us can effortlessly extricate ourselves from all this, if others, deeply affected, manage to change a little, far from the margin, the effort seems impossible. The consequences of all these small savings seem barely quantifiable, and unfortunately we can’t act individually on what would change everything. The divide is too great. How can we be anything but unhappy, when we feel that nothing is possible? It’s all about power. And without radical change, without a huge victory for the system against the system. Our efforts will be vainly concentrated on adaptation and survival in an environment where it will be increasingly difficult to exist.
Effort, the world, my friend, my friend, smiles when it frees the soul from the heavy weight of our terrible intransigence.”
Jacques Perconte
Discover the full text “L’Effort, le monde”: https://www.technart.net/effortmonde/?p=recherche_jacques_fr
Program:
What intimate connection is there between Research in your work and your relationship to nature? How do you go back and forth between what you like to experience and what you like to see and think about? Does this lead to a particular kind of energy that drives a kind of struggle, or at any rate nourishes a lively force of sharing? Do you feel you’re making a special effort to bring things to the state you think they should ideally be in? How do you see this relationship between heart and work?
❉ 15H > 18H : Table-ronde “Les sens, la recherche”
With:
Aurélie Herbet is a visual artist (permanent resident at 6b in Saint Denis), researcher (member of the Paris 1 ACTE institute), teacher (Maîtresse de conférences) and pedagogical manager of the Licence Arts Plastiques à distance at the Ecole des Arts de la Sorbonne (Paris 1 University). She creates installations, participatory devices and situated walks, during which walking reconfigures the experience of the place and environment in which the individual moves. Since 2017, she has been particularly interested in the mutations of the city and the relationships, sometimes conflicting, sometimes symbiotic, that it maintains with living things (summoning up notions of resilience, adaptation, mutation).
more info: https://aurelieherbet.com/
Sophie Lécole-Solnychkine is a senior lecturer at the University of Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, where she teaches aesthetics and philosophy of art. Her work, at the crossroads of the history of forms and the history of ideas, focuses on the nature of cinematographic and pictorial images. Drawing on contributions from the sciences that invest the ground, notably geology and pedology, she calls for a renewal of thinking about images through the effort of an ecology of images – by which she means the image analyst’s preoccupation with the way in which the figure makes milieu.
more info: https://www.editionsmimesis.fr/catalogue/dans-la-boue-des-images/
Clio Di Giovanni has lived in Chamonix for just over ten years. She travels the mountains on skis, on foot or in the water. After several years with the United Nations, working to protect endangered species, she is now involved in local projects, in particular to defend the area and its inhabitants that she loves so much. Equality, feminism and mountains are her daily life. She joins us here just back from a great adventure in autonomy, between women, on horseback, ropes and sliding in the sacred high snows of Kazakhstan.
❉ 20H > 22H : Musical performance by Julien Desprez
Electric guitar, podorythmy, electronics, voice.
When you only hear him without seeing him, it’s not obvious that Julien Desprez plays electric guitar. This young French musician hijacks rock’n’roll’s king instrument with a wholesome spontaneity, thanks to a whole battery of internal and external modifications. He plays with his pickups, transforming the sound with pedals; his hands seem to tap on the strings. His live pieces sound like sonic cut-ups, akin to so-called “glitch” music; we’re reminded in particular of Quebec techno producer Akufen alias Marc Leclair , with whom he shares this taste for jolts: his body almost dances when he plays, and the relationship he maintains with his guitar sometimes evokes the gestures of a magician who has marabouté a wild beast trainer.
More on Julien Desprez: https://linktr.ee/juliendesprez
This event is programmed as part of Nous courons à toute vitesse, an arts visuels & performance program from May 4 to July 14, 2024 at Le Générateur, and on the occasion of La Métropolitaine, the international contemporary art rendez-vous of the Greater Paris Metropolis. more info
Jacques Perconte
Jacques Perconte
Born in Grenoble in 1974, Jacques Perconte lives and works between Rotterdam and Paris.
For just over twenty-five years, he has been developing an audiovisual and cinematographic body of work in which environment and landscape are the vehicles of an aesthetic that disrupts vision as much as the technologies it implements.
His work moves between cinemas, exhibition spaces and the stage. His works, though they take a variety of forms (linear film, generative film, audiovisual performance, print, installation) are the result of ongoing experimental research.
From Normandy to the peaks of the Alps, from the depths of Scotland to the polders of the Netherlands, he passionately roams and films the elements. The surprising universalism of the form, which seems to hark back visually to what painting was like when it seized on nature as a motif, is born of the relationship between the delicate rhythm and apparent gentleness of the subjects and the extreme technicality of the images, which manifest their digital reality in all their dimensions. The energy of Jacques Perconte’s gesture is inscribed in the image produced by the camera, and is revealed by freeing itself from its constraints through the technological nature of the images.
Exploration with internet and video computing in the late 90s led him to lay the foundations of a new aesthetic as the first artist to work with moving images by hijacking digital compression methods. World-renowned for his singular mastery of images, Jacques Perconte takes us into the very nature of video and its making to find new proximities with its sensations.
Thanks to reverse-engineering and the expert manipulation of coding and storage technologies, this hijacking of the high-tech processes of the audiovisual industry goes beyond the technical question and succeeds in turning its landscapes into colorful fairy-tales whose critical and popular success goes from strength to strength.
This work is part of a critical history of representations, from painting to cinema. The landscape tradition is envisaged in a new primitivity enabled by technology: Jacques Perconte reveals to us “the landscape of the image rather than the image of the landscape”.
Internationally distributed in documentary and avant-garde cinemas and festivals, celebrated by critics, his films have been the subject of several retrospectives and major monographic programs. In 2014-2015,the Cinémathèque française dedicates to him the avant-garde cycle entitled soleils. In 2012, Léos Carax invites her to take part in his film Holy Motors. In 2019, Jean-Luc Godard uses an excerpt from his film Après le feu in Livre d’images.
While he did some audiovisual performances in the early 2000s, it was only ten years later that he returned to the French and international stages with prestigious musical collaborations (Jean-Benoît Dunckel, Jeff Mills, Mikhail Rudy, the Onceim, among others).
Over the past fifteen years or so, its link with research has grown stronger, first with the thesis of Bidhan Jacobs, then with the work of Nicole Brenez, Vincent Sorrel, Antonio Somaini, Vincent Deville, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Megan Phipps, Fred Brayard, Muriel Tinnel-Temple, Sean Cubitt, Yves Citton, Alice Leroy… who truly become actors in the development of his approach.
Collaborations are an important part of Jacques Perconte’s practice. They include filmmakers, composers, musicians and poets. To those already mentioned, let us note Julien Desprez, Samuel André, Julien Ribeil, Hélène Breschand, Eric-Maria Couturier, Julie Rousse, Michel Herreria, Didier Arnaudet, Marc Em, Hugo Verlinde, Jean-Jacques Birgé, Eddie Ladoire, Mélaine Dalibert, Simonluca Laitempergher, Vidal Bini.
His videos, infinite films, generative explorations of his research and impressions are presented in solo and group exhibitions. In 2016, he was selected along with a dozen living artists to rub shoulders with Gustave Courbet’s landscape paintings in the exhibition Courbet et la nature at l’Abbaye d’Auberive. In 2022, for six months he presents a new monumental video work for the French presidency of the European Union at the Conseil de l’Europe in Brussels. In 2023, the Lieu Unique in Nantes offers him a thousand square meters for a major monographic exhibition. In 2024, it’s at the Générateur in Gentilly and at l’Abbaye de Noirlac that he once again offers monumental works and the question of the spatialization of his images is engaged.
Jacques Perconte is represented by Galerie Charlot.
The research text What drives me is available in full at : https://www.technart.net/effortmonde/
Website : https://www.jacquesperconte.com/
Instagram : @jacquesperconte
more info on the exhibition L’Effort, the world from May 4 to July 13, 2024.
