Signal Mouvement, performance, 2019, Ateliers Vortex. Credits: Ateliers Vortex © ADAGP, Paris, 2019 / Violaine Lochu.
Signal Mouvement, performance, 2019, Ateliers Vortex. Credits: Ateliers Vortex © ADAGP, Paris, 2019 / Violaine Lochu.
Violaine Lochu sees herself as an heir to Pauline Oliveros, whose works accompany her in every creation. There are many similarities between her practice and that of the American composer.
For this exhibition, the artist was inspired by Lullaby for Daisy Pauline, a meditation composed by Oliveros on the birth of her niece, which invites participants to sing the “mmm” sound, “the sound of pleasure”, “to their favourite baby or to themselves”. With Système/Berceuse, Violaine Lochu explores the lullaby as a mode of relationship, as a way of taking care of one-self and others. While it touches the most intimate part of us, it also connects us to traditions handed down from generation to generation, usually by women.
Violaine Lochu, accompanied by three guests whose practices lie at the crossroads of music and somatic care—Alixe Llamas, Soledad Chevalier and Cathy Gringelli—will be experimenting with the various aspects of the lullaby during a period of collective research at Bétonsalon. They will be improvising “experimental lullabies” combining the tactility of sound and the sonority of gesture.
Visitors will be able to experience the emotional power of the lullaby and the way it touches bodies and minds in a final performance that will alternate between collective moments and more private situations where the songs will be addressed to them personally.
Violaine Lochu
Born in 1987, Violaine Lochu lives and works between Montreuil in France and Cotonou in Benin.
Violaine Lochu’s work explores voice and language, as well as notions of transformation and catharsis. Her artistic practice spans the fields of contemporary art, experimental music and sound poetry. Her projects begin with a phase of immersion in a specific environment, in which she gathers various sound, narrative and visual elements. From this material, she creates performances and installations in which sound, video and drawing interact, through collage, recomposition and reinvention.
The fictional worlds she invents unfold according to their own logic, while at the same time echoing our contemporary world and the issues that affect it (us). Based on these questions, Violaine Lochu questions and subverts classic oppositions – dream/reality, true/false, feminine/masculine, science/magic, etc. – and seeks to create new narratives.
Winner of the 2018 Aware prize and the 2017 performance prize at the Salon de la Jeune Création, she has performed at the Centre Pompidou, the Palais de Tokyo, Parade for FIAC 2017, the Jeu de Paume, the Playground festival in Leuven (Belgium) and the Performative festival at MAXXI in L’Aquila (Italy), among others, Ars Poetica in Bratislava (Slovakia), at the Quadrum gallery in Lisbon (Portugal), at the Kunstverein in Munich (Germany), at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva (Switzerland), at the Rickundgarden Museum (Sweden), at the Centre in Cotonou (Benin), at the théâtre le 4e art in Tunis…
