Chairs Falling
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Video installation, performance.
Three drummers interpret the sound of chairs being thrown down stairs as both 'soundtrack', 'foley' and 'graphic score'. The work considers improvisation and composition, performance, the archiving of performative events, the act of listening, the act of looking at active listening, and the fluid states of time and temporal actions in reverberant space. The unsettling and destabilizing event of the chair falling - an object usually offering a solid grounding to support one’s body, indicates a danger and an accident that loads the video material with a charge. The act of interpreting this uneasy event with improvisation marks the human recuperation of chance and accident into an active state.
Music is an amplification of time. The irregularity of the chairs falling marks an uneven temporality - the drums will not result in a regular meter, and this disjunction between clock time and durée was set in relation.
Various locations were selected for hosting a chair fall. This included structures that hold an overt authority or power relationship to the city. The final sites included Square Victoria, Palais de justice de Montréal, Hôtel de ville de Montréal, Basilique Notre-Dame de Montréal, and Musée de la Banque de Montréal/Banque de Montréal.
Exhibition History
Latitude 53
April 13 - May 26, 2018
As part of Les Transformables (V)
Curated by Eric Mattson
Edmonton
The creation of this work was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. Merci.