Fanny Bouyagui / Art Point M
Fanny Bouyagui describes herself as someone who “knocks around” the world. With curiosity and fear of boredom as fuel, she has been criss-crossing the planet and artistic territories for over 30 years. When she was a teenager in Lille, she wanted to work in fashion. She was oriented to a two-year degree in sewing, which slated her to join industrial textile lines: she then decided that she would no longer let others run her life. She left “to go on the road” and took odd jobs in Greece and Egypt. When she returned at the age of 27, she entered the fine arts school in Tourcoing, then quickly created the structure Art Point M, which was installed in a former fabric warehouse in Roubaix. Whatever her means of expression – fashion shows, exhibitions, multimedia performances, electronic music concerts, V-jaying, theatre –, Fanny Bouyagui shares her taste for elsewhere and for others. Others who are often dropouts, pensioners on the fringes: the homeless, the elderly, immigrants... If she gives them this visibility, it is not to move or shock us, but because they have something to tell us. As in her play A Few People More or Less, in which the spectators entered boxes in which a moving cabaret singer, a disillusioned strip-teaser or a young drug addict awaited them. She is returning to the Festival d'Avignon after having presented, in 2005 in the context of the 25th Hour, a performance titled Commercial Violence.
RB, April 2012