Massimo Furlan / Numero23Prod.

Vidéos

Après la fin, le Congrès (2015)

Project

The performance for Nuit Blanche 2015 in Paris and for PerformanceProcess at the Swiss Cultural Centre aims to appreciate thought as an act or an action, as was the case with the previous performance Héros de la pensée, based on children’s alphabet books and the notion of ‘thought in motion’. The eight actors in the performance, historians, anthropologists and philosophers, have exhausted their imagination and gone, beyond their resistance to alcohol and physical limitations, creating a network of solidarity, strategy and ruse, in order to overcome exhaustion and inebriation and to keep the discussion going for as long as possible: 26 hours for 26 words.

The performance took place in October 2015 in the halls of the Swiss Cultural Centre in Paris, and in the courtyard of the Nissim de Camondo Museum (Paris 8th arrondissement), which houses a collection of furniture and artworks from the 18th century. The museum is located right next to Parc Monceau.
In the rectangular courtyard of the Camondo Museum, an old carrousel has been set up. Carrousels belong to popular culture, like some sort of urban furniture directed towards children and that speak of funfairs and leisure. This set-up means we intend to use this familiar and recognisable object like a piece of ready-made art. The idea is to move it to a different context, say a museum or a place of culture, in order for it to be perceived as a sculpture or a temporary intervention. The carrousel is made to look strange and eerie with a lighting system and various fog machines that will create a sort of infernal and joyful, poetic and quirky mechanism. Music is also an important element in the installation. But the carrousel is also use as a set, a thinking machine that spins words, sentences and ideas around. Several thinkers, dressed in the same chequered costume and wearing a death mask, whose voices has been modified, get onto the carrousel and begin to talk throughout the night. They formulate ideas, concepts and stories that pertain to the world of art and artists. They recite words like some sort of alphabetical book, addressing concepts such as death, time, clouds, skies, trees and animals, living beings, and the wait…

Context

In 2015, Nuit Blanche chose to echo in an artistic way the Climate Change Conference, which will take place in Paris at the end of the year.
We decided to offer a performance/installation that highlighted the general issues of: the environment, the world and the Apocalypse, through an evocation of the different populations that inhabit the planet (animals, plants, minerals, men, gods, illusions and objects), natural elements (clouds, the atmosphere, stars, the sky, the earth and water) and apocalyptic events (catastrophes, wars, accidents, etc.).

Set

The set is reminiscent of a funfair, with a carrousel, music, lights and fog. It also evokes carnivals with costumes and masks, as well as images of macabre medieval dances. The title of the performance addresses the issue of the end (the end of time, the end of the world, and the end of the end). This is in effect a conference and a conversation that seeks to evoke, tell, and problematize what has and what might become extinct.

Situation

A conference comprising dead people speaks to the audience, gathered around the carrousel in the courtyard. The characters are dressed in three-piece chequered suits and wear death masks. Massimo also wears the same costume. Claire wears a black dress and a long wig. The actors/thinkers, who are all identical, address the audience and their companions, saying ‘I’ or ‘we’. They form a community. Their voices are also identical, as they will have been modified with computer software. It is impossible to identify who is speaking. There are soliloquies, dialogues and conversations with several voices. Each character transmits an experience, a story and some research in the past tense. The situation is joyful and apocalyptic, burlesque and worrying, learned and entertaining, cyclical, punctuated by the turning of the carrousel.

Fiction

One of the deceased (Massimo) evokes – through a sequence of ritualised gestures – a series of invisible objects, as if he were delving into a curiosity box, containing a haphazard collection of living and inanimate beings that inhabited the earth. He names what he has found in the form of a burlesque song or ditty that he improvises. The other deceased gather to evoke the object mentioned, talking one after the other.
Curiosity boxes were sometimes exhibited at funfairs. Popular and/or scholarly encyclopaedias, they served as instruments to understand the world. Miniature museums and microcosms, they contained objects from the earth, the sea and the air, bringing together three realms – mineral, vegetable and animal – as well as various artefacts. This fiction enables the actors to randomly evoke objects from different times and categories, and to give the ceremony a strange and eerie aura.
These bizarre collections included illustrations (engravings often), herbariums, insects, living and stuffed animals, teeth, feathers, bones, stones and weapons, basketwork, fabric, shoes, sculptures, musical instruments, medals, armoury… They usually exhibited the unusual, the strange and monstrous. As such, they have an original magical dimension.

Picture

The carrousel is in the middle of the courtyard of the Camondo Museum. Smoke comes out of the various fog machines. Colourful lights light up the carrousel and the courtyard. Music plays as the carrousel spins. Six characters in chequered suits with death masks – solemn clowns –, as well as a woman in black, stand on the carrousel and in the courtyard. When the actors are silent, they strike a pose, sitting on a horse, standing or leaning against a wall, on a balcony maybe, close to the audience. The character in black wanders around, watches and observes the audience.

Content

The beings and objects in the curiosity box are the objects of the discussion: a discussion that unfolds like an inventory, a map, an atlas or a lecture (for example: ant, grasshopper, dog, rat, monkey, lily, wild rose, stars, wind, wave… Bernard, Theresa, Virginia, Alexander… witch, shepherd, arrow, knife and camera…).
The audience feel like they are attending a mental theatre representation in which bizarre characters, akin to magicians, hypnotists, jugglers and preachers of all sorts, parade and narrate true or unlikely stories about the world.

The rules of the game

Massimo and Claire select the objects to be discussed beforehand, according to the research of each conference member. Massimo will announce every new object in the form of a short song, which the researchers will then use to describe and tell, but also – as in the case of a medieval exemplum, to play and prolong it, to place it in its era, opening parallels and emitting hypotheses, drifting, suggesting and discussing with the others. All this with a discourse that may be scholarly, encyclopaedic, but also narrative and extravagant.

At the Swiss Cultural Centre

The above text concerns the Nuit Blanche project. For the SCC, we are inside the Centre, in the exhibition room. We create a smoke-filled and noisy environment, where performers wear their costumes and masks in a specific installation. The discussion protocol is similar to that of Nuit Blanche – like a preamble to what happen for Nuit Blanche. The two performances help test the pertinence of our proposition and possibly modify it.

Approach

Massimo Furlan is a trained visual artist. He has been painting and drawing for several years and has exhibited in contemporary art galleries and museums. He also worked as set designer for several directors and choreographers before becoming director himself and creating his own company in 2003, Numero23Prod. His stage work develops a visual and performing language that relates to painting, installation, cinema and video.
Furlan’s approach focuses on the composition of moving images in the theatre as well as on more performative forms in public spaces and beyond the theatre walls.
The images of Massimo Furlan’s different stage creations are performed by actors who reveal themselves mainly through their gestures. Unlike drama and its process of building up roles, Furlan’s theatre features soulless, silent actors. When there are words, they are usually spoken not by actors, but by anthropologists, historians and philosophers who transmit, in a given context and often under a fictitious identity, a theoretical perspective: for example Bastien Gallet, Marc Augé and Serge Margel in 1973, under various identities relating to the Eurovision Song Contest, or Pierre-Olivier Dittmar, as a ventriloquist’s dummy in One Day.
A significant part of Massimo Furlan’s research is geared towards developing his performing work. His performances focus on topics such as the body, action, time and speech, and they are often designed to be performed in public places that are not intended for theatre: parks, gyms, football stadiums, airports, tunnels and stations, for example.
Furlan’s performances focus on an active dimension. The literal quality of action and the power of events are central themes. The artist engages in a process that goes from the enunciation and development of an idea to its realisation, which gives his research a conceptual as well as concrete dimension. The actual realisation of a simple action is colossal, and this is the what takes the most time and energy: for example, obtaining permission from the Parc des Princes in Paris to perform Numéro 10; gaining the trust of the director of Geneva Airport to run on the runway; getting authorisation to close the Gran San Bernardo tunnel for long enough to run through it.
Performances imply a strong experimental dimension. They leave room for the unpredictable, for accidents. They address questions of time and duration: some are extremely short (a few minutes only), while others can last for hours. Most of all, they provide time to live…

Vinciane Despret, philosophe, psychologue
Yoann Moreau, anthropologue
Pierre Olivier Dittmar, historien du moyen-âge
Jean-Claude Schmitt, historien
Philippe Artières, historien
Sophie Houdart, anthropologue
Thomas Golsenne, historien de l’art
Chloé Maillet, historienne
Arnaud Lambert, historien de l’art et réalisateur