Fuir les saumons
Performance - Game of fishes and loves- Anchovy tasting
Wednesday, the 7th of June 2023, 20:30
Flux Laboratory Athens
12 Geronta str, 10558 Plaka
The large-scale fishing industry, supermarkets, the appeal of sushi, toasts, bagels: these eating habits have shaped our consumption of fish, forcing us to prefer salmon and its industry to other species. We, therefore, accumulate certain forms of toxicity inside our bodies and, by extension, in the relationship with our own body. Often, the body gets really clogged, to the point that it cannot get rid of certain traces.
Malicious, with its very soft and sleeky skin, the salmon awakens wounds, by superficially bandaging them, thanks to its tender and melting flesh. A superficial layer that allows it to be integrated into the body.
Fuir les Saumons is a performative and research work that wishes to cure and care. It constitutes an analogy between our ability to assimilate certain ichthyan traces (from the world ιχθύς in ancient Greek) and to rejuvenate our relational behaviors. It is also an analogy that redefines our attachments as well as the ecologies of our love lives.
In the deep waters of her emotional space, Mathilde Rouiller has swam with salmons for a very long time. Since last May, in the Mediterranean, she has been experiencing a curative process, re-envisioning the fish that should be eaten, while prioritizing Mediterranean fishes, raising the question “which of them could be cultivated or savaged”. Τhe Mediterranean, through its landscapes and cultural subtlety, acts as a welcoming and sharing space, especially for this research and creation.
Through her performative work, Mathilde Rouiller brings her personal experience into a dialogue with the Mediterranean Sea and its fishes and with the consumption habits of this territory, to understand further how these metaphors weave relationships with the toxicities of our love lives.
The research and creation develop in several stages.
Firstly, there was an attempt to weave the links that could exist between an anthropological investigation around the production of fish and choreographic research around digestion/processing (that of a heartbreak or a meal). This chapter takes place in Athens with the support of Flux Laboratory Athens.
Furthermore, the video dance work unfolds in different scenes, functioning as a scenography / ritual staged through diverse scales and times. This action on different times has been set up in the forms of “pre-enactment”, “enactment” and “re-enactment” and it is based on Mediterranean territories in the Aegean Sea, sea with which Mathilde Rouiller shares experiences and traces.
Credits
Performance staged and performed by Mathilde Rouiller
Video directed by Mathilde Rouiller in collaboration with Parissis Panos for DOP and editing
Produced by The Textured Form, production support by Elissa Kollyris
Costumes by Resi Bender
Game of fishes and loves illustrated by Amélie Bigard
Assisted by Konstantinos Mouchtaridis
With the participation of Kyveli Zoi and the multiple voices of the Game of fishes and love
With the contribution of Daphnis and Chloe
From a research and investigation made in residency with the support of Flux Laboratory and Alkinois
Mathilde Rouiller (Paris, 1993)
Artist-researcher and curator
Artistic director of The Textured Form
Member of Contemporaines
Mathilde Rouiller is a dancer and specialist of performance; she has been following diverse workshops with international choreographers. As she was trained as a performance artist, she followed an academic path. She graduated from EHESS in history of dance and performance studies, that she discovered at Columbia University.
From 2017 to 2020, she assisted diverse lighting artists for whom she has been developing diverse concepts, on different scales and territories, that brought together choreography, staging, or immersive kinetic installations. In the meantime, she was staging and curating diverse exhibitions and events for emerging visual arts scene in Paris. Since 2019, she is a member of Non-profit Organization Contemporaines.
In 2020-2021, she was part of the experimental program in politic arts created by Bruno Latour and led by Frederique Aït-Touati, in where she experiments diverse forms of collective practices, such as a commission for Palais de Tokyo or Hôpital Bichat.
As a multi-disciplinary artist-researcher and art worker, her practices have mostly been produced through collective networks, that sometimes cross over and other time disconnect from one another. She is currently focusing on the notion of landscape (being shaped by bodies and abiotic elements such as light) as an ever evolving in-making movement and a pattern of imagination able to inform and transform an established panoptical world into in-between visions.
In 2022, she founded The Textured Form, a laboratory for research and creation about movement, scenography, and performance.