REACCLIMATING THE STAGE (SKENOMORPHOSES)

vincent roumagnac

REACCLIMATING THE STAGE (SKENOMORPHOSES) An Ecotonal Doctoral Piece in 40 Scènes, 15 Parergonal Writings and 5 Double-Postcards. From the perspective of mise-en-scène (staging), and correlatively that of the place and the practice of the metteur-en-scène (theatre director), this artistic research project addresses, examines and experiments on the question of the scenic/scenographic representation of a postnatural world, in climate transition, affected by global warming and moved by abstract data-flows, in a tangled web of storms, information, and algorithms. While lived and conceptual "time", no longer telically given as linear and chronological, is being anthropodecentered and, therefore, diffracted into an open plurality, the Reacclimating the Stage (Skenomorphoses) artistic research project takes the earlier notion of time as a raw material to reexamine, from an eco-scenic and research perspective, in order to transform the theatrical practice of its author and to trigger the latter’s specific contribution to artistic research milieu. By obliquely playing on one hand with memories of theatrical history of scenic internal modi operandi, architecture, and literature, and on the other hand with institutional requirements for doctoral research appearance, the project aims at repositioning the director's practice in a movement of transition of scenic thinking and imaginary through a series of artistic and research experiments, whose enactments and resonant redistribution are poetically at interpretative play in this exposition.

Paysages Différés

Deferred Landscapes

The Deferred Landscapes project happened after I decided to leave the black box of the theatre to deterritorialize myself, both geographically (towards an “off-stage” world experience) and practice-wise (towards other aesthetic regimes and strategies). The experience of this deterritorialization was made visible and shared publicly by the construction/installation of metamorphosable scenographies, built, or rather rebuilt, landscapes from a memory/memorization of the terrain, reified in thousands of little boxes of folded paper (called memorel for memory element*), with a direct print of the surface of a sampled pixelated fragment of photographs taken during the drift. Based on close-up croppings of digital photographs of plants, human architecture or skins, the Deferred Landscapes installations may refer to 3d models, miniature cities or scattered VR constructions rescaled to human scale dimension. The Deferred Landscapes durational and transformative project (also titled temporarily "A genetic of the digital image" in dialogue with the dramaturge Emmanuel Guez, or the "Invention of the Memorel" in reference to the novel by Bioy Casares The invention of Morel published in 1940) is made up of a total of 10,000 memorels, and exists in a twofold way, both as temporary reconfigration through visitable scenographies and as stored/redistributable memory databank, potentially redistributable into iterations of identical but modified landscapes.

* Memorel : (from memor-y el-ement) the memorel is a small hand-folded paperbox with on its top-side a print of an extraction of pixels from a photography of a referent site. The memorel image is composed of 130 pixels. The memorel is the unity of construction (brick) of the program The Invention of the Memorel/A Genetic of Digital Image/Paysages différés. Its grid is quoting Paul Klee’s « Sonorités Anciennes » -19351.

List of the successive landscapes:

Sakura Zensen (memorels: sakura cherry trees/Japanese modernist architectures)

Tokyo Sites (memorels: Japanese momijis maple trees)

Forêts (memorels: diverse trees in diverse forests)

0% (memorels: modern architecture Lyon)

Tokyo Flowers (memorels: diverse Tokyo flowers)

Berlin Wondersite (memorels: utopian architecture Berlin)

Maipu, 349 (memorels: Buenos Aires)

Beatriz Viterbo (memorels: diverse skins)

Ochitsubaki (memorels: Japanese camelias and VR camelias)