Paris Performances: Le Réalisme (Realism) #1 with Pauline Ghersi & Liv Schulman
Entrusted to Pauline Ghersi and Liv Schulman, whose practices are identified in the video and object fields, this year's Paris Performance cycle will take place over three evenings from December 2024 to June 2025. With their singular sense of humor, and accompanied by amateur actors, the two artists have entitled their proposal “Le Réalisme”, as a playful exploration of the most fundamentally banal everyday life.
“Our project is called Le Réalisme (Realism). More than a project, it's a vision, a state of mind, a philosophy. Realism is an enterprise that shows off all our pettiness, the kind of inner performances that operate at the level of intimacy: when, for example, we imagine that not paying for a drink at the bar when we've had a bad time will make up for lost time or jealousy towards our best friend, or when we imagine that a service rendered is worth an invitation to a restaurant or the purchase of a packet of coffee or a kilo of flank steak. The mechanics are displayed in all their pettiness, giving pride of place to a flat, dull everyday life of trivial joys and futile despair inspired by blockages, rivalries and obsessions.
The first occasion is the development of a play that contains a piece of amateur theater within it. In this embedded play, called Les Mesquins, all the actors are mean-spirited. In each multi-dimensional character, one trait rules: meanness. They're no more or less petty than anyone else, they simply display their shameful obsessions obscenely to reveal a world impoverished of joy. The fear of commitment, the repetition of lifestyle and confinement, married life, the repetition of obsessive neuroses, single life and its despairing affects will be confronted by the lightness of a group of characters who spread themselves out between the auditorium's armchairs, in a choir of tragi-comic monologues and recalcitrant dialogues of idiocy.”
Pauline Ghersi & Liv Schulman
