installation and multimedia performance (monitor, turntable, surveillance video camera, electric motor, water tank, lamps)
Bertrand LAMARCHE performing "Vortex "
With Etienne Jaumet (Music)
Live at Le Confort Moderne, 03/06/11
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| Bertrand LAMARCHE, Vortex |
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| Bertrand LAMARCHE, Vortex Installation view |
In one of his last performances, the subject was the upturned image of a cyclone, in an indefinable context, between cloudy sky and desert. Vortex Lounge is an event with neither narration nor beginning nor end. A meteorological phenomenon takes place in the exhibition room. An effect for a Hollywood disaster blockbuster where everything is revealed. The performance itself borrows from the codes of a DJ set: a turntable put on slow-mo, no vinyl, the needle sliding over the rubber giving off sighs, static, tearing. A cylinder filled with water, then spun, induces a whirlpool whose spirals catch debris: a “vortex machine” equipped with video camera projects images of a landscape transformed into hypnotic chaos. Image and sound function in symbiosis, raising each other to a higher power. Bertrand Lamarche shows a particular interest in “whirlpools” and “vortices” through devices with produce effects of ambience, total-immersion, subverting household materials and hardware. He is fascinated by thresholds, openings to infinity: whirlwinds, maelstroms and tidal waters, vortices or again gigantic urban agglomerations, the cities of tomorrow sometimes calling to mind playthings or giant models. He focuses on “hollow bodies”, pockets of emptiness existing in the real: tunnels, demolition sites, quarries but also tornados, black holes and ditches or channels of smaller dimensions. The artist composes realist chimeras, concretising a vision, having architecture as his principal subject, pushing into the foreground the points linking utopia and reality.Text for RIAM 2003, Marseille, FR
Vortex was Performed for several shows or curatorial Program: in New York, ( Thread Waxing Space 1999), Paris (Le Centre Pompidou 2008, Le Point éphémère 2006), Chicago (Art Chicago 2001), Poitiers (Le Confort Moderne 2011 and Toulouse (Printemps de Septembre 2008)
