Dette sans raison is the river at your door situated/participatory performance
Dette sans raison is the river at your door is a corporeal and discursive exploration of the relationships between the guest, the host and a residential site.
The performance is designed for one person only (each time) and must take place in a residential site (condo, sublet, apartment, house, coop). The participant must organize themselves, through their own networks, to visit the home of a person they know very little, a stranger.
This should be a place where the participant, newly transformed into a guest, can be allowed to be alone for about an hour. It is preferable that the visit takes place during the day, but at night may be possible if more convenient. It is preferable that the host is not present in the place or the same room for the duration of the visit.
The performance Dette sans raison is the river at your door consists of an audio recording that the participant can download and listen to with headphones. Before the day of the visit, the participant will receive a small bag from the artist, containing material elements that can be discovered to the rhythm of the guide voice on the audio recording. Through precise instructions, the audio directs the participant's sensory attention and probes the visible, invisible or inaccessible dimensions of the room.
In this project vision is positioned as considered always experimental, always incomplete.
The audio recording directs the viewer's attention, both to the inner sensations of their body and to external relationships, exploring sensation,slowing down, energy, localization-proprioception, breathing and simple eye movements. Attention techniques build rhythms and textures, exploring ways of intensifying and inventing circumstances. Specific ways of looking, touching, holding and imagining in the room will be offered.
In the wish for this project to go beyond a framework of transaction, the host will receive salty and sweet prepared foods and delivered to their home. At the end of the project, all participants will be invited to a gathering at the artist's home for dinner.
To be invited is to be (undeniably) overwhelmed by the fact that you are “not at home”. As Jacques Derrida writes, becoming a guest means realizing one's difference and one's strangeness in the eyes of the host, and the consequent somatic flows of accepting help. Guesting and hosting are employed as techniques to deepen encumbrance, deepen entanglement with one another and place
