Varosha
François Martig
In addition to the exhibition ACHROMATOPSIE, l’Œil de Poisson and Avatar present two films by Martin Bureau and the performance of François Martig on October 13 in the large gallery of l’Œil de poisson.
The exhibition Achromatopsie proposes to put the notion of “collective consciousness” into perspective by works that examine areas and boundaries, real or imagined, poetic, political or even economic that may conceal others. Invoked by this issue, which faces art, Avatar invite François Martig in residency to work on a new performative form of his project Varosha presented in 2016, in Belgium.
The artist describes his experience in Varosha, a town on the Cyprus island : “a blind spot where the most radical aspects of modernity are amalgamated.” Once a tourist paradise, but now a ghost town since the Turkish invasion in 1974, Varosha is today a heap of empty and dilapidated buildings.
The performance, resulting from this project, allows to see excerpts of testimonies interspersed with blacks and silences. Appearances and disappearances of images and sounds draw live the moving borders in which spectators experiment this fluctuation between what is told or interpreted or perceived, between what is concealed and what is hushed up, consciously or not.
François Martig’s work uses a wide range of media, from sculptural and sound installations to radio documentaries and photography, in order to react on the specific social and geographical context in which it is shown. In addition to his visual work, he produces live sound and music performances as well as soundtracks combining soundscapes, field recordings, electro-acoustic and noise music. He’s also sound operator for movies. He’s a member of Mono-Mono, this association created with Emilie Roi is really involved for visual and sound art in unusual places. During the last year they produced a residency for sound artists on the Verdun’s battle fields.
