Guillaume Aubry / Antonio Contador
“The love story (the « episode, » the « adventure ») is the tribute the lover must pay to the world in order to be reconciled with it”. With the sexual revolution in full swing, 1977 saw Roland Barthes publish A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (tr. Richard Howard), the most personal yet most universal of his essays, returning to the major themes of a by then rather shopworn Romanticism that had long since ceased to furnish the re-enchantment of the world envisioned by early nineteenth-century artists. The third session of Partitions (Performances) offers a fresh contemporary reading of Romanticism and its subsequent manifestations through a selection of love letters compiled by Antonio Contador and variations on the theme of sunsets, a constant feature of art history, collected by Guillaume Aubry.
Antonio Contador / Taxonomy of Love Letters (performance by Helena de Laurens)
Since 2010 Antonio Contador has been working on a project researching written correspondence, building up a considerable corpus of love letters – often anonymous – found in junk shops and yard sales or passed on by his circle. Following the first phase of the project presented at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2013, he has invited Helena de Laurens to perform a series of vignettes forming what he describes as a heuristic approach to Love. Letters on friendship, the love between parents and children, great passions, and lovesickness form the substance of a performance intended to give voice to messages from various historical periods and backgrounds, all of which reflect an adventure that is both highly individual and universally familiar.
Antonio Contador was born in Vitry sur Seine, near Paris, in 1971. He is an artist and researcher, completing his doctorate in art and aesthetics at the University of Paris in 2015. The principal focus of his work is language, particularly brief anonymous narratives picked up on his travels, giving a voice to figures – major or otherwise – overlooked by history. His work has been exhibited at numerous venues including the WIELS in Brussels, the Palais de Tokyo and the Gulbenkian Foundation in Paris, the Museu da Republica in Rio de Janeiro, and the Serralvès Foundation in Lisbon. The present performance was prepared at the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers and the DOC. www.antoniocontador.net
Guillaume Aubry /Chasing the Sun
Guillaume Aubry has spent several years working on a multifaceted project exploring the artistic and aesthetic issues of the observer’s gaze and the landscape it falls on, most notably on his tumblr caspardavidsomething.tumblr.com which raises the question of tourism as a potential artistic endeavour. In parallel, the philosophical concepts of the sublime and of Romanticism feed into a theory-based research project entitled « Chasing the Sun » which is to form the basis for a doctoral thesis in aesthetics studying sunsets. Guillaume Aubry’s presentation for Partitions (Performances) will take the form of a transversal commentary on his corpus followed by an invitation to those present to take part in a sound recording at 26 minutes past eight, at the precise moment the sun is due to go down. The « Sunset sound record » project was initiated during a summer spent as artist in residence in Iceland and developed at the most recent Lyon Biennale.
The artist and architect Guillaume Aubry was born in 1982. He spent a year in Tokyo studying for a Masters degree in urban sociology and qualified as an architect at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-La Villette. He then joined the visual arts research programme at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. He is also a graduate of the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Art Plastique and teaches at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Saint-Brieuc, Brittany. He is also co-founder of the FREAKS architecture collective in Paris.
