KompleXKapharnaüM
In Villeurbanne, the visitor pushes a shaky door that is never closed, and comes across a strange laboratory made up of interconnected hangars. Machines can be tinkered with there, new ones made out of recuperated bits, images can be shot there, archives can be reworked there, sound or computer programmes can be developed there. These former municipal workshops unquestionably offer the most accurate portrait of KompleXKapharnaüM, this artists' collective, this team of video-makers, plastic artists, writers and musicians founded nearly 17 years ago. All this material created inside the city is then deployed in situ on the walls of cities invaded by images, sounds and words to locally recreate and very often with the inhabitants' memory, documentary frescoes involving everyone, the artists as well as the public. These urban interventions bring art into the city, in places where it generally does not have the right to go. But in clearing a path to the individuals concerned, it deploys effects that are as spectacular as they are civic. In 2004, KompleXKapharnaüM opened the Festival d'Avignon with SquarE, Local Street Television, a poetic and political stroll that developed its dramaturgy on the walls of the city through videos filmed in Avignon.
ADB, April 2012