Damien Marchal

SOUND AT WORK In Damien Marchal's installations, sound is an explosion: a voluntary, creative and destructive event that blows up relational systems to hear them better. Damien Marchal is a sound artist: using complex technical devices, he makes sound an event that disrupts the environment and signifies a "passage to the act". Decryption. To break with certainties, to question the validity of reality, to establish a new present, an unknown future: there is in what is called in psychology the "passage to the act" a notion of violent crossing, of impossible to go back. It is also a mode of brutal rupture of the relational process, where the action replaces the word, an authoritarian way of signifying its presence in the world and of entering in relation with the other. This could still be a metaphor for the creative gesture, where doing it takes the place of the utterance. “Appetite for destruction” In Damien Marchal's work, this notion of acting out takes on a double meaning. In recent years, the artist from Rennes has been particularly interested in terrorism and the changes of state which upset the relationship with others. Fascinated by the moment of destruction, the T moment (more than the chaos itself), he sets up strategies in which the action (in the sense of performance as an artistic form) matters more than the end result. Creating the better to destroy, Damien Marchal shows in certain works an attitude that one could quickly define as post-punk. An “appetite for destruction” which takes sound as its medium and the necessary technological arrangements as an aesthetic. Thus the performance Die Verbrennung der Walküren (La Combustion des Valkyries) (2011) is the modernist transcription of the myth of Penelope: using dynamite wicks, the artist weaves the title of the work on a canvas, before setting it on fire. His postulate: “Eight hours of work with no other interest than choosing what this day represents. Without stopping, having control of the function, the choice of the finality, working for oneself. ” In the background, we can detect in this deliberate choice of destruction an unconscious critique of the art market, associated with the value of work: the artist remains the master of his work, and makes the choice to "capitalize" or not. , on its creation. A desire for power which is embodied in various projects. Sound as an event Garbage Truck Bomb (or Le Bombardier du Poor) is an emblematic work of Damien Marchal's approach. Exhibited at the contemporary art center La Criée during the Rennes Biennale 2010, this complex device takes place inside a skeleton of a garbage truck made of wood at scale 1. Inside, fake gas canisters and a cellular GSM detonator connected to the car radio, which sets off a violent sound explosion. This can be activated by the viewer, via SMS, whenever they want. The action thus reproduces the blind violence of the terrorist act. The artist delegates here the responsibility for the accident of which he is the author. In Garbage Truck Bomb, the truck is only a visual aid that allows you to better focus on sound, a real way of disturbing the environment. A violence taken to the extreme in Waiting for the Pigs (2010), a sound sculpture evoking both the torture suffered by detainees at Guantanamo, to whom the CIA required to listen to music continuously at a very high volume, and the assassinations carried out in the 1960s by Charles Manson and his gang. A fan of storytelling, Damien Marchal takes the position of the one who dominates a situation of tension, of surprise. Hence a relationship to the performance, to the here and now of the work: Hymnus In Ioannem & Western Digital is an “electronic / organic duo”, in which the voices of 35 singers spread across the audience respond to sound vibrations generated by 10 hard disks, forming a uniform drone whose human sound is impossible to distinguish from that of the machine. Preferring to hide the technical complexity involved in some of his pieces, the artist often calls on collaborators - a taste for working together that can be compared to his practice in the Vivarium workshop in Rennes. , where ideas and processes mingle. A way to involve the process of creation in the world, to better dynamise the obvious. Magali Lesauvage Text published on the Gaîté Lyrique website, in partnership with Exponaute