Les Urbaines, Lausanne, 2015

L’homme-trolley-bus is a public performance and an installation presented in Lausanne during the art festival Les Urbaines.

To understand this work it is necessary for me to explain the historical background by which it is inspired and which links it with the city of Lausanne. During the early 1980’s in the streets of Lausanne it was common to encounter Martial Richoz, named by the population « L’homme Bus » (the bus man). In a few years this man became a popular figure and part of the contemporary folklore of Lausanne.

Martial Richoz, who was a fanatic of the Lausanne bus company TL and all trolley-bus vehicles, created his own imaginary bus company because he could never achieve to drive once in his life a bus due to psychiatric problems. As a kid he start to play in the streets as a bus driver building soap-box buses which became over the years more and more accurate. Few of those soap-box buses are today part of Musee de l’Art Brut collection. But the work of Martial Richoz wasn’t only to act as a bus driver in the street – his home was full of handmade components of a public service company.

All this activity was looked on by the population with a certain ironic gaze but Martial Richoz had a sort of distance with his « foul » activity describing it as a necessity for him to not have deep depression and to simply be happy. To share his own words: I create an imaginary work to be happy and people say I’m crazy, but I see only people being sad to go work and for me they are crazy.

The bus man got controversial in 1986 after few people asked the authorities to block this activity because sometimes Martial Richoz would get too much into this fiction world and asking people for tickets on the street, sometimes getting aggresive otherwise the imaginary bus company never affected the daily life of Lausanne and when Martial Richoz was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, a big public debate started on the liberty to behave in public space.

This work was first intended to awake this collective memory doing re-enactments of the bus man in the streets of Lausanne. To prepare this activity I made research on the actual public bus company and met people who knew Martial Richoz. I followed the way Martial Richoz created his company to find out a sort of method and what necessary elements were required to open such an enterprise. My position wasn’t to speak about Martial Richoz and his personal problem. My goal was to center the collective problematic of acting « out of the norm » in the street and create an imaginary work. A second point was to keep the memory of bus man alive and consider this folklore figure as part of the city history which was somehow forgotten or barely saved as raw art phenomena.

The interesting point of this story is also that several newspaper interviews and few tv interviews of Martial Richoz who spoke as a real bus company manager and said at the same time that is an imaginary company. After weeks in psychiatric hospital he decided to close officially this activity with a public statement and said that he was forced to close his imaginary company to be able to be released from the hospital.

The title is already evoking the controversial relationship between the manager of imaginary Lausanne bus company and the community of the city, because « bus-man » was considered by Martial Richoz as unperfected cause his company was composed by Trolley-bus. In one interview he declares that the correct public nickname should have been « the trolley-bus-man ».

Below are some pictures of my Les Urbaines performance and installation and link for a documentary on Martial Richoz L’Homme-bus.

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far° Nyon, programme Extra time, August 2015

Performing: Andrea Marioni & Jan Jullierat

La guerre des mondes is a theater piece inspired by the War of Worlds written by H.G. Wells and radio adaptation of H.G Welles. It tries to figure out if such a war could be scientifically possible and what relation human beings have with extraterrestrial life.

The plot turns around the meaning of being Human in the universe and the singularity of such a kind of phenomena: there is only one species of human being. A recurrent question in the background of the play is to explore the need of humans to research another form of intelligence similar of the human one. A second main topic is the fear of assimilation from alien life and the loss of human capability.

The play moves freely on different levels as much taking inspiration from astrophysicists theory of human and universe, psychological theory and games between aliens meant as extraterrestrial life and being alienated as a human among others.

The acting play is directly inspired by Andy Kaufmann’s stage presence to underline the wish of being on stage as alienated people trying to questioning their human reality, as an intelligence form in universe, as a species in the heart, as part of a community and as an individual.

A running gag is made with the name of the performer « Andrea Marioni » which became little by little a sort of song or a concept that twisted from a situation to another and invert the position of the audience with the performer, also both actors on stage present themselves as « Andrea Marioni » to end in the situation that everybody is « Andrea Marioni » and that in fact « Andrea Marioni » is an alien form of life try to assimilate the audience.

Games with quantum theory are frequent to change times and the « form » of actors whom are sometime not anymore their character change ways of playing. The presence of actors is so going from a sort of recurrent Andy Kaufmann-like presenting as Andrea Marioni asking himself naively what it means to be human, to get than into a more TV-like presentation of universe theory, psychiatrist interview, musical for children and army training.

Another theory evoked explores the difficulties of humans in sci-fi movies like Kubrick’s 2001 a Space Odyssey or Tarkovski’s Solaris to keep a psychological balance going far from the earth and how humans could potentially deal with the exit of his natural planet.

Scenes of the piece are constantly playing with notion of huge (the universe) and microscopical (the brain) and the effects in our psychological perception of such dimensions.

A speculative answer is also given taking inspiration from a science anecdote around the word « Quark » which was according to Stephen Hawking the first scientific term not inspired by latin but taken from James Joyce’s novel: Finnegans Wake. So the theory announced by the character of the play is that the only way to explore the universe is to combine poets and astronauts in space missions, because poets could create news words to overtake human limits of perception and that poetry is the closest way of expression with quantic rules.

The play was also broadcasted live on radio and a part the possibility to open the stage into an abstract dimension this situation was also used in the play to announce that one of the singularity of our planet is sound and that human beings try to communicate into the space by radio wave to find other form of life.

Below are a few pictures ©Arya Dil and a video captation thank to @ElieGrappe

into the exhibition Screamscape, Fri-Art, 2015

Screamsafer is based on old public service « street screamer ». This work presented in French cities during the middle ages and early modern times was a figure of free popular speech. People could write messages destined to be heard by everybody – it could be a simple commercial for a shop, a love declaration or a political statement. The screamer was a channel to share those messages often anonymous, especially for political issues.

Here Screamsafer was working with the same methodology, as we are in a time of social network but also under constant control. The service of a public screamer can guarantee a public free speech and debate with the assurance of anonymity.

The performance was activated in between others live art proposal during all Fri-art Screamscape event. Here few archive pictures.

Costume design is a collaboration with artist Marta Margnetti.

with Collettivo UP, Sonnenstube, July 2015, Lugano

Collettivo UP was created on the occasion of an invitation from the art space Sonnenstube, Lugano to artists running Urgent Paradise art space in Lausanne.

The crew of Urgent Paradise decided instead to show works by each member to create a collective. This freshly born artist group didn’t have any works to present in the upcoming exhibition in Lugano. So Collettivo UP (Urgent Paradise) went to Ticino for a week residence and created several situations that were constantly documented. At a second moment, all this material collected was used to invent the history of Colletivo UP and the exhibition in Sonnenstube was presented as a retrospective.

The title addresses the fakeness of this Collective and the retrospective exhibition. At the same time this fiction produced real works that have been shown in the exhibition and Colletivo UP continued aftewards to participate in a few art exhibitions in Switzerland.

The production method is also inspired by community of artists living in the mountains, like Monte Verità or other exemples. Members of Colletivo UP stayed for a few days in the isolated village of Ditto and started to work and produce their story.

Below are a few pictures which also include a performance realized for the local people living there.

Several installations were taking place with different recurrence and several printing works have been produced.

The video here was also part of the exhibition and somehow it resumes part of the production process and members of Colletivo UP.

Hors-lits, Vevey, 2015

This performance invites the audience to be an anonymous artist meeting where possible to share problems of aesthetics openly. The plot is a confession on success and self destruction, how being a stage persona can affect intimate relations, how to create a line between the behaviours of characters played on stage and in daily life. All topics address d ego, individuality, public life, collective actions.

A shot of bitter juice is offer at the end of the performance announcing that everybody is ready for a collective suicide.

Using black humour and drama strategies, irony comes in flashes and as mechanism of self- psycho defense.