Mordicus
Apropos
"Mordicus (adverb, Latin mordicus, biting). familiar. With stubborn firmness.
Ex: to support an opinion.
Mor-di-cus. Three syllables for three installations within the same exhibition. A title that squeaks in order to bring a little humor in a charged context. The works exhibited at Halle Nord are the result of a year's research work. Three parts unfold: the first, performative, Nolens Volens, the second, a video installation, Hic and Nunc, and Atelophobia, the third, a wall installation.
If the three works have been planned to dialogue ad finam in the same space, the first is shown in two stages. It brings together 215 flags from around the world - including those of self-proclaimed states - extended without hierarchy or special order on clotheslines in the courtyard of the Halle de l'Ile. A profusion of colors is suddenly located in the heart of Geneva and draws an aerial mosaic. This refers to the vision of our society, as it wishes to define itself in terms of borders and policies. It is not expected that this laundry of the world dominates the passage throughout the exhibition. The strings will be dismantled, during a performance, by people of respectable age - with whom Stéphane Blumer has worked in several workshops.
Collected before being arranged in the space of the exhibition, the flags will be reduced to "balls" of colours, - "little patriots", to use the terms of the artist - reaffirming the abstraction of their own symbolism. Let's remind ourselves that the ideal of the nation-state would be to incorporate people from the same ethnic and cultural base, even though most states turn out to be poly-ethnic. If some people can not understand the value of this concept without prior explanations, people who already have a life behind them often do not want to believe in this ideology born in the nineteenth century. This is why Stéphane Blumer asks to undo the floating installation, to bring it down from its authoritarian position to reduce it in a few gestures to small things punctuating the ground. A work that perfectly illustrates Stéphane Blumer's field of research, located at the crossroads of the visual arts and social sciences."
Text by Karine Tissot - full press release here : https://www.halle-nord.ch/event/mordicus
Presented works visible here :
