TRANSFIGURATION

OLIVIER DE SAGAZAN (FR/RCB)

The human face hasn’t yet found the face and that it’s up to the painter to give it it (Antonin Artaud).
In this performance, Olivier de Sagazan, a multifaceted French artist born in Congo, stages the transformation of a face that gradually loses its human features. A minimal setting focuses the attention on the artist, alone on the stage, with clay as the only material. Under the eyes of the spectator a new face is moulded, an identity is formed and deformed: an office worker without a history, in spasmodic search of his true identity, is transformed assuming monstrous features and revealing his hidden side. This enthusiasm for decomposition also hints at the artist’s fundamental need to remove the taboos of this sort of “Holy Face” in order to return to a simple “head of butchered meat”, as Deleuze said about the figures painted by Francis Bacon. Fascinated by this performance, director Ron Fricke, author of Baraka and director of photography of Koyaanisqatsi, included it in his latest film Samsara as a revealing element of a society oscillating towards other social paradigms.

TRANSFIGURATION by and with Olivier de Sagazan

SUN 20.10.2013 | 17.30 | 20.30
STUDIO FOCE – LUGANO

interview Olivier de Sagazan on his performance Transfiguration