An immersive experience where bodies and chaos reveal what the walls hold.
Performance, Dance. June Vivès and Adrien Ouaki have been developing a collaboration since 2020 based on the dialogue between movement and image. Through choreographic creations, performances, and film projects, they build a sensitive shared language, where two forms of writing meet and evolve together. Mémoire des murs is an immersive in situ performance conceived for L’Anomalie, a former space dedicated to painting from live models. For 30 to 40 minutes, the audience is guided through different spaces along an evolving route. The project explores the memory of places and objects through fragments: real or invented stories, memories, projections. The walls become a sensitive archive, crossed by presences and traces. Between movement, voice, and image, Mémoire des murs offers an intimate and shifting experience, where the spectator moves through the heart of a space in transformation. This project draws on this history: that of a place where bodies were looked at, observed, interpreted, traced, where human presence was both a subject of study and a space for projection. what interests us is not necessarily reconstructing this past, but exploring what it leaves behind, what persists without being visible, what continues to inhabit the place in the form of traces. For 30 to 40 minutes, the audience is invited to move through the space. they enter an environment that is already inhabited. figures appear — motionless, alive, almost silent — as if suspended in a pose, on the border between live model and frozen image. they seem to belong to the place, to its state, to its time. Gradually, something shifts. a tremor, a breath, a gaze. the image tips over. the bodies come to life. these “living works” become guides. they lead spectators from one space to another, revealing fragments of memory connected to the building: possible stories, dreamed memories, imagined projections. the narratives do not seek historical truth, but the sensation of a porous, unstable memory crossed by the imagination. the walls become a sensitive archive. what was seen here — the bodies, the postures, the gazes, the silences — reappears as living traces, carried by the performers. the piece is therefore part of a research process on the passage from image to living presence, on the way a body can become the support for a memory, and on a place’s capacity to be activated as a space of reminiscence. the spectator does not watch a linear narrative: they pass through an experience, compose their own path, connect what they see with what is missing. The rolling format, with several performances per evening as part of Nuit Blanche, allows for an intimate, shifting experience and a continuous flow of audiences. by taking over L’Anomalie as a porous space, crossed by its past and present uses, Mémoire des murs proposes making the place itself into living matter, capable of retaining, transforming, and transmitting what has passed through it. The route incorporates different media: - Embodied performative sequences - A live vocal presence (singer) - Film projections in the cinema room, like reactivated memories Mémoire des murs transforms the place into a living organism: the paintings breathe, the models remember, the walls speak Instagram June Vives Instagram Adrien Ouaki Instagram Opendor Company There are places that continue to exist through what they have hosted, as if the bodies, gazes, and silences that passed through them had settled there permanently. Mémoire des murs is an immersive in situ choreographic creation conceived for L’Anomalie, formerly a school for painting from live models, now rehabilitated as a cultural space. In partnership with l’Anomalie, Théâtre de la Suspension.
Source: paris.fr — photo: Kelsey Hunter