arrière-salles (2024)

“backrooms” is a collaborative and evolving creation laboratory bringing together 5 artists in live and digital arts interested in the aesthetics of online feeds. I invited Jules Leloup Mayrand, Laurence Petitpas, Laurence Gravel and Vincent Thériault to create performances in dialogue with a screen installation at Le Lieu in Québec City somewhere between January and February 2024.

In the theater, the wings are spaces hidden from the spectators that make possible the sequence of scenes in a show. In Internet culture, the backrooms represent the digital equivalent of the wings. These non-places are considered as parallel, empty, and interconnected dimensions, from which a language describing our world through obscure references (memes) emerges, betraying a disconnection from reality.

For me, this creation laboratory was born from a desire to initiate himself into performance and to bring this new discipline closer to his virtual practice to make a digital approach that appears too rigid to him more playful and lively. In this sense, the in situ work allows an interinfluence between his work and that of the invited collaborators.

Collaborators

Laurence Petitpas, performer + installation + support

Jules Leloup Mayrand, performer + installation

Laurence Gravel, performer

Vincent Thériault, performer

stvn girard, co-curator and advisor

Alexandre St-Onge, advisor

Le Lieu, Québec, CA

Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec