“Less is more”: the motto could sum up the philosophy of Shared Landscapes, “s7 rooms between fields and forest” offered by Caroline Barneaud, curator, and Stefan Kaegi, director of the Rimini Protokoll company in the Pujaut forest 8 km from Avignon. expect neither theatre, nor dance or any form of traditional spectacle: in each sequence, the spectator takes part in an artistic experience which flirts with other disciplines, anthropology, geopolitics, physiotherapy, in order to bring different points of landscape view.
4 p.m. The first stage is signed Rimini Protokoll. Headphones on, we follow a casual conversation, moving like the clouds, lying in the woods looking at the treetops. A child, a psychoanalyst, a forest agent discuss our fears, the unconscious in the forest, Ukrainian mythology, the forest agent talks about his profession and the territory, teaches us about nature or the parachuting ground that is down the hill. Deliberately the opposite of the event, this first step invites us to listen to what surrounds us, to be attentive to what the territory will offer us.
5 p.m. This time with virtual helmets, we offer ourselves the experience of levitation: we leave the ground, we rise in the air, with a simple image of the surrounding landscape, as if we were on board a a drone, or rather an airship. An experience where one frees oneself from the law of gravity. Beware of vertigo.
Scale changes
5:30 p.m. We continue to gain height with the little booklet imagined by the Turkish-Belgian artist Begüm Erciyas and the German director Daniel Kötter: we zoom in and zoom out on a territory of the Caucasus, a zone of conflict between the Armenia and Azerbaijan, coveted for its gold mine.
The same site is seen from a satellite, a drone and at eye level, three different scales to understand a territory taken over by the Azerbaijanis, via a drone war, thanks to the support of Turkey. A different reading of the landscape, via geopolitics.
6 p.m. After individual experiences, the dancers Chiara Bersani and Marco D’Agostin offer us a group experience in a landscape that we really share by forming a circle. What remains of our origins? We have in our ears a beautiful text by Baptiste Morizot. Our body bears the trace of different identities, that of predators (“touch your eyebrows, that hairy area of the body that we share with wolves”), and that of prey (“touch your eyelashes that we share with gazelles and deer”). The body also bears the trace of time, like the opposable thumb that allows you to type and write, two million years old.
6:30 p.m. Brass comes out of the woods, the bushes, whirring, they will play lying on the ground. The Unless Orchestra performs compositions by Ari Benjamin Meyers, four musical pieces composed for soil, birds and air. Magical interludes in osmosis with nature.
Between dog and wolf
8:30 p.m. After the picnic break, a documentary is staged in the vineyards, performed by three actors. He questions the European agricultural policy, which does not finance transitions to organic but continues to think about surfaces. Corentin, cellar master in the Vaucluse, plays his own role and tells how he works organically and the transformations of the landscape.
A researcher in ethology, the science of animal behavior, talks about the language of the fly, the lark, with a “Jamy” side. It alerts us to the decrease in biodiversity. The tone is a little didactic, but leads to reflection and awareness, in the wake of Bruno Latour’s “performed conferences”.
9:30 p.m. At one hour between dog and wolf, the spectators gather in front of a rectangular screen, the subtitles of the landscape which speaks to us. It evokes our feelings during the day (“I saw you getting hot“). Unfortunately, the speech then turns into an injunction. The spectator takes a big slap when he was until then in a relationship of trust with the device.
Fortunately, a concert of contemporary music closes the day, with a magical setting, a sky riddled with lightning that evening. What better scenery than a landscape?
“Shared landscapes”, until July 16 from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m., in Pujaut. festival-avignon.com
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