Constantin Dubois

Installation

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Close your eyes. A banal, everyday action, yet which gives us a doubly divine power. To close your eyelids is, first of all, to destroy, instantly and without effort, the whole of the visible. It is to dash into the dark vault, to free yourself from the oppression induced by the maze of objects, letting it mortally ensnare us. And it is, later, to allow the world to delicately re-emerge, this time as strictly audible. We then dive into a pure, sensuous and womb-like magma, protected a priori from anxiety. What appears constitutes the elementary humus of a child’s world, always begun afresh, always new. What journey does a person go on when they close their eyes for good? What limbo, what ridges does he cross, what paradise does he reach, he who hangs on to consciousness, when he has already turned his back on the world, like a stone? The technology of video games is used in Ere de Repos to create an aural territory in which the player moves around virtually, equipped with headphones and a gamepad. His possibilities are moving and listening. All he has to guide him now is a wolf: a kind of common Cerberus, a bridge between two worlds. Although shaken by its disconnection from the shimmer of the screen, consciousness deploys a new vitality here. The gamer becomes a Player again. He once again takes the risk and the joyous freedom of creating the rules while playing.

Constantin Dubois

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Remerciements

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Antoine Fontaine, Le Fresnoy, ma famille, Xavier Wielemans, Raphaëlle Duquesnoy, Léonore Mercier, Clément Rosset, Yasmina Benari, Thomas McIntosh, Elodie Wattiaux, Elsa Fauconnet, Laurent Naud, Thérèse Szymczak, Maxence Ciekawy, Nicolas-Pierre Réveillard, Victoria Duhamel, Clément Goffinet et le Parc Argonne Découverte.