The Audience and the Power, 2016
Participatory performance based on a narrative framework and audience instructions. Duration: 20 minutes.
Presented at the international conference Adaptation, Revision, Translation: From Life to Art, from the Page to Stage and Screen, Université Catholique de Lille, 2016.
The Audience and the Power is a twenty-minute participatory performance built around the fictional story of an artist whose work is repeatedly destroyed. Rather than repairing or remaking it, the artist continually adapts its mode of presentation in order to maintain its existence. The narrative follows a fixed cyclical structure: exhibition, destruction, adaptation and renewed exhibition.
During the performance, the audience can introduce characters, events and actions into the story, as well as impose movements on the performer. I must absorb these interventions while preserving the narrative structure and completing the performance in exactly twenty minutes. Each activation therefore produces a different text and sequence of actions, while the underlying cycle remains unchanged.
Video documentation of The Audience and the Power, a 20-minute participatory performance in which the audience intervenes in the narration and directs the artist’s actions.
Video stills from The Audience and the Power, showing different moments of the performance as participants intervene in the narration and direct the artist’s actions.
The Audience and the Power tests whether an artwork can remain unified through material division and successive changes in its mode of presentation. No definitive text precedes the performance: only a narrative structure that must persist while its content is repeatedly transformed by the audience.
The work separates identity from material and textual stability. What remains constant is not a fixed object, action or wording, but a cyclical organisation capable of absorbing disruption. In the fictional narrative, the artist preserves the work not by restoring its original form, but by continually redefining how its altered remains can appear and be recognised as art.
The performance reproduces this structure in real time. The audience can interrupt, redirect and complicate the work, while my task is to integrate its demands without losing the narrative cycle or exceeding the fixed duration. Adaptation therefore becomes both the subject of the story and the condition under which the performance itself continues to exist. Its ontological question—how an artwork can persist through material transformation and changing modes of presentation—continues to shape my practice and remains central to my current research.
Cover of Résonances 16, in which the article accompanying The Audience and the Power was published.