Xavier Michel
Medium-term residency
February - July 2025
Xavier Michel. Poitiers, 1990
Soft, non-erectile, and non-long-lasting shapes, added to the behind-the-scene actions for preparing a show or setting technical elements (TV set or concert stage) as well as language and its ambivalence, and music, are all materials that compose Xavier Michel’s performances.
In the studio he builds sculpture/tools or systems whose functions are not predetermined, for example, transparent tape coffee cup, soft drumstick, mini-grand-pianos-peanut- dispenser, stilts of his own feet in flexion or poorly automated body prostheses. As an experimental approach he looks for the different meanings they adopt function to the use. In this process, objects induce body postures, and both influence each other, generating lot of surprises. The use of these sculpture-tools explores original narratives that bring together, in an unexpected way, different semantic fields producing new fictions.
In these stories the body of the performer deals with systems that escape his control, where the expected result of an action is very uncertain, where making mistakes generates shapes, looking for the right balance between fragility and clumsiness, absurdity and melancholy.
Photo: PointKIT
