| My practice involves the formulation and performance of an artistic practice of life. The basis of this artistic practice of life is the individual subject. Approach in this manner, an artistic practice of life is intrinsically linked to ethics—how should the individual subject live? Of equal importance to ethics are the politics and political potentials emerging from the performance of such an artistic practice of life. The artistic performance of an individual life opens up beyond the idiosyncrasy of the individual subject and its ethics toward the political life of the community. The performance becomes a matter of interacting with the sensible: looking, seeing; listening, hearing; moving, thinking, imagining. The performance is a life project, and is embodied in the idea of the journey. |  |
Antoine L’Heureux
My practice involves the formulation and performance of an artistic practice of life. The basis of this artistic practice of life is the individual subject. Approach in this manner, an artistic practice of life is intrinsically linked to ethics—how should the individual subject live? Of equal importance to ethics are the politics and political potentials emerging from the performance of such an artistic practice of life. The artistic performance of an individual life opens up beyond the idiosyncrasy of the individual subject and its ethics toward the political life of the community. The performance becomes a matter of interacting with the sensible: looking, seeing; listening, hearing; moving, thinking, imagining. The performance is a life project, and is embodied in the idea of the journey. The journey takes shape through a series of expeditions each of which is the attempt to encounter a specific figure relevant to the ethics, poetics, and politics of the journey itself. Every expedition becomes the attempt to reach the world in which each figure lives, the Black-Throated Diver’s world, Adagny’s world, and the insect’s world.
The journey started two years ago with the encounter of the ornithologist Amelia, who researches the Canadian bird named Black-Throated Diver. An expedition to the Great North of Quebec was performed to observe the exceptional, “suicidal” behavior of the Black-Throated Diver. The journey continues and takes a significant turn when Adagny, a young Swedish girl apparently living in China, is met during an art exhibition of the project in the U.K. Adagny became the object of an expedition in China. Adagny was finally to be found in a flower garden in Beijing. At this stage, the journey was presented in a solo exhibition at Platform China Contemporary Art Institute. As this exhibition became swarmed with insects, the figure of the insect became the object of a new expedition in my flat in London.
The practice is embodied in a single project: A Poetico-Ethical Journey: the Black-Throated Diver, Adagny the Beautiful little Swedish Girl in White, the Insect and …, 2006-in progress. The project is exhibited as installation of works of prose, photography, and painting. The specific purpose of the installation is not a documentation, an archive, or simple storytelling, but a complex of sensations prompted by words and forms hoping to enable repetitions, “re-performances” of the journey.
