Hugues Decointet

Intrigued by a Samuel Beckett text about the voice, Hugues Decointet created an index of descriptions of voices and interviews with actors on the subject of voices that they like. He subsequently turned this into a play combining texts and sculptures. Neither performance nor radio play, Drama Vox is presented literally as a “little voice theatre”. By manipulating the wooden objects that make up the sound material, a vocal portrait emerges which gradually becomes architecture. Its reduced format, nevertheless, means that it is more of a model; put simply, it is the utopian projection of a theatre.

In the work of Hugues Decointet, changes of scale, changes of status in props and objects, and changes from representation to presentation are stage effects and reversals of situation that disturb our perception of the real. Every object is capable of being an image and every image is taken from a possible film. Decointet marks out spaces with stage techniques in which objects are both
receivers and transmitters. The energy needed in order to activate and literally animate the venue is the spectator’s own curiosity. A shared moment emerges; the mobile, photographic eye takes the body with it in a mobility that is itself a picture.

coproduction Playground (STUK Kunstencentrum & M-Museum) / Ferme du Buisson
with support from the French Ministry of Culture and Communication - DICRéAM

Performance Day is coproduced with the Playground festival, (STUK Kunstencentrum & M-Museum Leuven), with support from the Agency for Arts and Heritage of Flanders, as part of the project "Alfred Jarry Archipelago" initiated by La Ferme du Buisson Centre for Contemporary Art in Noisiel (France), Le Quartier Centre for Contemporary Art in Quimper (France) and Museo Marino Marini in Florence (Italy). The venture is part of Piano, the Franco-Italian art exchange platform, in collaboration with M-Museum and the STUK Kunstencentrum in the framework of Playground in Leuven (Belgium).