Hantédemos

Performance

Nous sommes le festin is an adaptation of “We are the feast”, the words in ecofeminist Val Plumwood’s book in which she recalls the ontological shock that struck her when she saw in the eyes of a crocodile about to attack her the greed of a predator looking its meal.

With remarkable gentleness, Plumwood reminds us just how much the West has built its culture on a human exceptionalism that denies the truth: we are prey for some animals and will be food for others when we die. This reflection was the starting point for a story. It unfolds in a performance and an installation with the same name.

Nous sommes le festin brings together three different voices:

• Hante, a human, played by me, replaced by a wooden puppet in the installation,
• Shell, an artificial intelligence housed in a fool’s sceptre held in Hante’s hand,
• a fox taken in by Hante, a 3D chimera video-projected onto the stage.

Nous sommes le festin explores the strange bond that Hante establishes with the vixen, for him a figure of otherness: that of the animal and, by extension, that of nature, seen as an external and alien entity, an immanent divinity.

For Hante it also represents a disturbing figure of the lover, expressed by a desire to be devoured. During the performance, Hante and Shell converse, singing in two voices, and the obsession with the human becomes clearer:

He is in search of his own body, seeming to have become disincarnate in contemporary complexity. Almost as fleshless as his virtual interlocutor.

Hantédemos

Hantédemos is a French artist born in Paris in 1990. He lives and works in Marseille. A 2015 graduate of the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy (ENSAPC), his work is driven by writing and follows the common thread of fictions manifested in film and performance, clearing rabbit holes in capitalist realism. Their performances have been shown at the FRAC Aquitaine, Around Vidéo in Lille, Le Point Ephémère in Paris, Mains d’Œuvres in Saint Ouen, La Station in Aubervilliers, Ugly Duck in London, and their films at La Fab, Césure in Paris, Around Vidéo in Lille, Go Short in the Netherlands, etc.

Production

Credits