Massimo Furlan / Numero23Prod.

Vidéos

Live me/Love me

While watching singers perform in public on television, I had noticed that numourous young girls shouted their boundless, blind love and admiration. I had also noticed that there were no boys, or rather that they were few and more contained. The girls loved the singer, they loved only him. The singer seemed to expect their expressions of love. In the eyes of the boys I thought I read melancholy, the beginning of failure. One has to go up a flight of stairs, alone, in the night.

At the top of the stairs, the spectator is faced with a big window, which reflects its image. There is a microphone and headphones.

Once the headphones are on, the light changes, and one sees a stage behind the window: a velvet couch, two women in sequin clothes, and the singer in red and gold. The three characters move in the space, mumrmering. The red light recalls that of a nightclub, or of a peep-show.

The girls are bored and lascivicious, vulgar, sexy, they have too much makeup on, they are pretty and tired. From the singer in his grotesque outfit, emanates a threatning violence. Agressivly and desperately, he demands recognition, love. The scene is as if taken from a bad B movie.

The spectator is forced into a situation of exchange: the women must prove their love, give a persnal object as a gift to the singer. Only then do they receive a love song, performed live and recorded on a tape which they can take with them. The men receive a deal of another sort: they must recognise the women’s love for the singer and are in a in a sense invited to take his place: they must sing a love song, which will be recorded, but not given to them. In return, they receive the complicity of the two call-girls, a smile, an encouragment, a gesture.

And if nothing happens, if the spectator refuses to enter the game and refuses the constraint, the light turns off and he remains alone, faced with his/her own image, and is forced to leave the space.

And when the exchange has occurred (which can last between 3 and 30 minutes, or even longer), the spectator, stunned, goes back down the stairs in the dark, and returns to the harsh light of the waiting room where the next visitors attempt to read his face for clues as to what took place and will happen to them.

Finaly, the stories are shared, but all are different, unique, as each exchange. Faced with the violence of the singer’s demand for love and recogntion, the spectators are left with a feeling of uneasiness. Tragicaly lonely, miserable, the singer conveys an artificial, enigmatic but also grotesque image. He confronts us with a demand – that of boundless love- which we can not fullfill. He dispossesses us of a part of ourselves, cheats us and leaves us in the dark, resourceless.

With:
Anne Delahaye, Shin Iglesias and Massimo Furlan
Lighting:
Thomas Hempler
Technical advisor:
Lionel Haubois