Founded in 1996 in Villeurbanne, in a disused factory converted into a workshop for artists, volunteers and amateurs who'd come to experiment and test their relationship to images, the KompleXKapharnaüM live performance collective has since 2000 moved into urban territories to add some zest to the daily grind. They work in residence in the towns and cities that invite them, and they work closely with the local people who they in turn invite to their installations. KompleXKapharnaüM calls on city dwellers to take another look at their streets while they lead these urbanites on festive, creative and dream-like wanderings through them.
Square Local Street Television
KompleXKapharnaüM has a plan – to take-over TV, re-appropriate urban space, uncover some human kindness somewhere while screens are shutting everyone inside their apartments, towns are fragmented, people who live there, in some areas, are sometimes just “forgotten”. KompleXKapharnaüM spent several weeks with local people, living their daily lives in the spaces and narrow streets of Avignon. This group of artists empathized with the people and had enriching encounters with the neighbourhood personalities as well as patients abandoned in a hospital complex. They filmed the faces, recorded the words, the sounds, the pulse of Avignon. The public is now invited on an entertaining and delightful stroll through the streets which are completely transformed by these walking audio-visual artists, manufacturers of sound, artisans of “wander-ful” machines. Images projected on walls and facades, portraits of residents of a building here or a housing estate there, whispers of common history... SquareEtélévision's noisy and personalized circuit around the streets also calls into question the ramparts of the City of Avignon which physically separate the centre from the outskirts. They have found a way of causing accidental meetings and of rubbing out, at least for one evening, the dividing line between fiction and reality, between the actor and spectator.
Distribution
the team : Marion Baraize, Stéphane Bonnard, Matthias Degoul, Pierre Duforeau, Fabrice Duhamel, Gilles Faure, Nicolas Forge, Gilles Gallet, Pierre Jacob, Vanessa Levet, Christophe Montoloy, Bastien Paquier, François Payrastre, Nicolas Pilepic, Nicolas Thiry, Patrick Weiler, Géraldine Winckler
Production
coproduction : Lieux Publics Centre national de création des arts de la rue - Marseille, Festival d'Aurillac, Le Cargo Scène nationale de Grenoble, Bonlieu Scène nationale d'Annecy, Théâtre de Vénissieux
en collaboration avec : le Festival d'Avignon
avec le soutien : de la DMDTS et de la DRAC Rhône-Alpes