Julie Vayssière / Judith Deschamps
The theory of communication developed by Marshall McLuhan in The Medium is the Message (1964) laid the foundations for analyses of the effects of technology on its use (Understanding Media. The extensions of man, 1964). For the second in the series of Partition (Performances), Julie Vayssière and Judith Deschamps set out to explore the medium, as it were, the better to understand what message it acts as messenger for. Julie Vayssière’s Songs explore music, while Judith Deschamps draws on her avatar in the second stage of her performance Metamorphosis.
Judith Deschamps / Metamorphosis # 2
Judith Deschamps works in an age in which reality and virtuality coexist to the point of occasionally becoming indistinguishable. Her work since the 1970s has constantly explored the dialogue developing between the media and ourselves. Her works, planned as documentary fictions, grasp the real only to subvert it by generating further realities. In Metamorphosis #2, Judith Deschamps’s avatar will discuss its existence as a virtual being and its status as a work of fiction, questioning the codes and representations that shape our sexual identity and the forms that technology offers or thrusts on our bodies, our manners of thinking, and our identities.
Judith Deschamps was born in 1986 or 1954 and lives in Paris or Santa Monica or New York. Her work has recently been shown at the Montrouge Salon and the Nouveau Festival at the Pompidou Centre. She is currently in residence at the Mains D’œuvres art centre in Saint-Ouen, near Paris, where she is working on her first solo exhibition for spring 2016. She is a graduate of the Ecole supérieure des arts décoratifs in Strasbourg.
Julie Vayssière / Songs
How can music be narrated? This is the question Julie Vayssière sets out to answer in her latest performance. « There is music in the sighing of a reed;There’s music in the gushing of a rill; There’s music in all things, if men had ears (1). Good music is never wrong, and goes straight to the depths of the soul to seek out the grief that devours us (2). To know a people, listen to their music (3). Music must humbly seek to give pleasure; extreme complication is the opposite of art (4). Silence is the true music, notes do nothing but frame it (5). The beauty of music, like of light, is its swiftness, its mobility, its elusive quality (6). Music begins where the power of words ends (7). Music is important… It’s the only thing that unites young people. A sort of Esperanto (8). Music is the same everywhere. It brings people together. It’s a force for good, a common language (9). The vase lends its shape to the void, music lends its shape to silence (10).
1. Lord Byron, 2. Stendhal, 3. Plato, 4. Claude Debussy, 5. Miles Davis, 6. Jean-Michel Jarre, 7. Richard Wagner, 8. Françoise Giroud, 9. Jack Lang, 10. Georges Braque »
With thanks to Fanny Batt, Damien Airault, Lucien Clainchard and Giuseppe Velasco.
Julie Vayssière was born in Toulouse in 1979 and is a graduate of the Ecole supérieure des arts décoratifs in Strasbourg. She lives and works in Paris. Her work can be seen as a poet’s-eye view of the consumer society and the mass culture it produces. Since 2012 she has been working on a project based on an alternative history of art, drawing on accounts of artists’ trajectories. The project was initially launched at the Triangle in Marseilles and has since been presented at the Schaufenster in Selestat, the Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, and the Sazmanab art centre in Tehran, Iran. Julie Vayssière’s work has also been shown at a number of venues in Paris including the Commissariat, Treize, the Goethe Institute, and the Maison de l’Amérique Latine, in Marseilles at the Actoral festival and Triangle, in Strasbourg at the Museum of Modern Art and the Syndicat Potentiel, in Quimper at the Le Quartier art centre, and at the Mains D’œuvres art centre in Saint-Ouen.
